Last week at Storage Networking World Brocade stepped right into the middle of the Fibre Channel over Ethernet fray with the announcement of two new converged network adapters (CNA) and a top-of-the rack FCoE switch. Since June last year the company has intimated about these products - they did not announce an FCoE blade for their DCX data center switch they had previously talked about.

Nor did they announce mezzanine adapters for blade server environments.

Now to the details: Brocade announced two CNAs: single- and dual-port adapters that replace Fibre Channel host bus adapters and Gigabit Ethernet adapters in servers and provide connectivity to both networks via a combination of Fibre Channel and lossless Converged Enhanced Ethernet. According to Brocade's claims the CNAs offer as many as 500,000 IOs per port. The CNAs are the second to market for single chip ASICs - QLogic announced their single chip CNAs more than a week before Brocade. Both vendors' CNAs are in qualification at original storage manufacturers such as HP, EMC, Dell and IBM. In addition, both CNAs are expected to be available to customers in the next few months.

The company also announced the Brocade 8000 Switch, a Layer 2, multiprotocol switch, which includes 24 10 Gigabit Ethernet Converged Enhanced Ethernet ports and eight Fibre Channel ports using 8Gbps speeds.

Further, both the QLogic and Brocade CNAs enable iSCSI, but as a software-initiator. Because both use ASICs instead on discrete components, there is added real estate on the board for implementation of future applications such as encryption.

Also because of the ASIC implementation, the adapters consume less power and have much higher performance than previous first-generation offerings that relied on discrete components.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.