IBM joined the converged networking bandwagon today with the announcement of several Fibre Channel over Ethernet products for its BladeCenter blade servers and its xSeries servers.
Among the announcements were products from Blade Network Technologies, Cisco, Brocade, Emulex and QLogic, which support the newest lossless Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) standard and FCoE. Both standards let Fibre Channel traffic run over Gigabit Ethernet pipes, saving on power consumption, cabling and adapters that fit in the server and connect it with Fibre Channel storage-area networks and the IP network.
Blade Network Technologies is offering an FCoE ready Gigabit Ethernet switch for IBM BladeCenter servers that offers as much as 100Gbps uplink bandwidth and consumes about as much power as a standard light bulb. It is a 24-port 10Gbit or 1/10Gbit switch that delivers 480Gbps of bidirectional throughput.
IBM chose Emulex to integrate its LightPulse 8Gbps Fibre Channel Expansion card for the BladeCenter HS22 blade environment. The Emulex LPe1205-CIOv is a dual-channel adapter that fits in the CIOv slot on the HS22.
Finally, IBM chose three QLogic products to represent its entry into FCoE and CEE. The company is using two QLogic Converged Network Adapters (CNA) – one a mezzanine card for the BladeCenter and the other a PCIe adapter for IBM xSeries or any x86-based servers – and a Passthrough Module for the IBM BladeCenter. The Converged Network Adapters are notable in that they are the first on the market to use a single-chip ASIC, which reduces power consumption, speed performance and leave a sizeable footprint on the adapter for future storage applications such as encryption.
Both Converged Network Adapters feature one-third the power of existing CNAs and provide an FCoE offload engine and support for priority flow control, jumbo frames, checksum offloads and segmentation offloads.
