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these new standards, present and future improvements in storage density and compute power will be held back by a lack of interconnect bandwidth. Ethernet as a Storage Interconnect
Ethernet as a storage connection started with Network Attached Storage systems, but more recently became available for SAN systems using the iSCSI protocol.
Although originally targeted at file sharing applications and user “home directory” storage, NAS systems have become increasingly popular for enterprise applications that manage data through a file system interface.
Today you can find significant NAS deployments in support of a very broad range of enterprise applications, including large- scale database storage. Cloud storage in particular has seen an upsurge, based on the requirements of operational flexibility, ease-of-use and low total cost of ownership.VDIs (virtual desktop infrastructures, serving client desktops from centralized storage to 1000s of users) are increasingly deployed on NAS systems for these very reasons. And as demands on storage bandwidth and responsiveness increases, 10GbE has become commonplace and widely available on high-end NAS storage systems.
File-based access protocols have always played a significant part in driving Ethernet adoption, and continue to do so. But new Network File System (NFS) standards – NFSv4.1 in particular, standardized by the IETF in December 2008 – blur the distinction between file based access and SCSI block based access. NFSv4.1 supports both, while significantly increasing parallelism and throughput over earlier
versions.This unifying protocol promises to make Ethernet even more popular in the data center.
SAN block-based storage protocols designed to run effectively over TCP/IP emerged in 2003. One, the iSCSI protocol, was specifically designed to take advantage of all the ease-of-use, availability and guaranteed delivery mechanisms provided by TCP/IP over Ethernet, providing a seamless path from 1GbE to 10GbE and beyond, while adhering to the behavior expected of a standard SCSI storage device.
iSCSI has been particularly successful for storage consolidation
supporting application servers in environments where simplicity, flexibility, and price/performance are the critical IT decision factors, as well as for more affordable and efficient backup and disaster recovery solutions for distributed data centers. iSCSI deployments are at the departmental or regional level of very large enterprises, or in the main data center of medium and small enterprises. Most are “green field” SANs replacing direct-attached storage, particularly in Windows and Linux environments in which limited admin support, host attach costs, and infrastructure complexity have traditionally inhibited Fibre Channel SAN deployment. iSCSI is also a popular solution in virtual server environments, blade server environments, and remote offices providing “light-out” data management and protection.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet and Convergence NAS and iSCSI have consistently been the fastest growing sectors in the storage device market over the past 5 years, and are expected to maintain their high growth rates in the coming years as performance and functionality improvements expands their applications reach. A large number of enterprises today have “Ethernet only data centers” with all storage traffic using a mixture of 1GbE and increasingly 10GbE for NAS and SAN, with 1GbE for remote datacenter connectivity. This phenomenon is likely to become increasingly widespread in the coming years as 10GbE is more aggressively deployed in the data center and beyond, and as early adopters employ 40GbE and 100GbE inside the data center.
Extending Ethernet’s reach further, there’s now “Fibre Channel over Ethernet.” FCoE is a protocol specification that enables Fibre Channel commands to be transmitted natively over Ethernet infrastructure using an optional transport mechanism instead of TCP/IP, without requiring an investment in a separate FC network. The FCoE T11 specification was ratified in May 2010, and is designed to maintain backward compatibility with existing Fibre Channel endpoint infrastructure, and targets data centers with SANs wishing to have a “converged” Ethernet network infrastructure.
FCoE-only networks utilize existing optional Ethernet capabilities, such as Jumbo Frames and Pause. FCoE adds extensions to the protocol to provide reliability without incurring the penalties of TCP (in particular, to guarantee the
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