* FCoE, FWoE, PoE, and even EoE
Ethernet continues to build on its role as the great unifying force in networking, with vendors pushing technologies with “over Ethernet” in the name.
At last week’s Storage Networking World trade show in Dallas, EMC and NetApp announced products supporting Fibre Channel over Ethernet, as my colleague Jon Brodkin reported. This is just the latest move toward bringing FCoE to more businesses, with interoperability tests completed in September.
Brodkin notes that FCoE is a defensive move on the part of Fibre Channel vendors, which are heading off efforts by those using iSCSI for storage networking. Meanwhile, many Fibre Channel users are still looking at Fibre Channel products, just starting to become more familiar with what’s going on with FCoE.
Then there is FireWire over Ethernet. FireWire is a technology primarily used for connecting PCs to video cameras or external hard drives, anything that would need a high transfer rate.
This week, ZDNet’s Jason D. O’Grady blogged about the latest on FireWire over Ethernet. He points out that while it is not currently possible to run FireWire over Ethernet, the IEEE is working on an extension to FireWire that would enable FireWire over Category-5 Ethernet cabling.
There are other “over Ethernets,” too. There is ATA over Ethernet, PPP over Ethernet, and of course Power over Ethernet, which is getting the most attention these days.
The most bizarrely named “over Ethernet” I’ve seen is “Ethernet over Ethernet,” which Light Reading reported on this week. It’s described as KDDI’s own proprietary way of doing Mac-in-Mac, or Provider Backbone Bridging, and “encapsulates traffic under carrier MAC addresses for the backbone to read, which means fewer address numbers get used over the backbone.”
On a related note, why is it always “over” Ethernet? Why not “under”? “In”? “On”? “To the left of”? “Through”? Just a thought.
