Converged Networking and Storage
The Tech Field Day Virtual Symposium with Brocade continues with a discussion of convergence between networking and storage. Joining Chip Copper, Principal Engineer at Brocade, are Josh O'Brien, Tony Bourke, and Stephen Foskett. This Virtual Symposium is a co-production of Tech Field Day and Packet Pushers.
Part 2 of the Virtual Symposium turns to the topic of convergence. The delegates discuss the core questions of convergence:
What's stopping convergence and what's driving it?
Who owns responsibility organizationally?
What protocols (Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI, or even NFS) "count"?
Contrasting the financial benefits with the management complexity.
A discussion of other protocols (especially iSCSI) over lossless-Ethernet (DCB)
Comparison of buffer credit mechanisms (as in Fibre Channel) with pause mechanisms (in DCB Ethernet)
Demands on Ethernet hardware design to support converged traffic (less over-subscription, larger buffers, etc)
The heavy demands placed by solid state storage on storage networks
The role of Ethernet fabrics in converged networks
The challenge of ETS (802.1Qaz) and DCBX for storage vendors
Considering the difficulty of implementing congestion notification (802.1Qau) in network hardware