Hardware vendors primed for FCoE love-in

Intel, QLogic, EMC, Emulex, Cisco...

A Fibre Channel over Ethernet standard hasn't even been accepted yet, but such a trifle hasn't stopped the hype from reaching a fever pitch today at Storage Networking World in Orlando.

Intel, QLogic, EMC, and Emulex all pledged their support for the protocol with products and partnerships. Of course, these are the some the main backers of the standard, which is currently being mulled over by the T11 Committee of the American National Standards Institute.

Intel's FCoE

Intel said it's developed a FCoE initiator that will be bundled with its 10Gb Ethernet PCI Express server adapters. Chipzilla also unveiled a FCoE-capable copper adapter for data center rack installations.

Intel boasts that its 10GbE server adapters are the first to support FCoE, and will unify networking between servers running Xeon chips and Fibre Channel SANs.

The news ties in with Cisco's announcement today of a new FCoE Nexus 5000 switches it co-developed with the soon-to-be-aquired Nuova Systems. Brocade also plans to heavily cater to FCoE with its upcoming products.

The Intel 10 Gigabit AF DA Dual Port Server Adapter will begin volume production in May, and will be priced at $799. The company said its entire 10GbE lineup will have FCoE support on Red Hat Enterprise Linux by July and on Windows later this year.

So does QLogic and NetApp

Today QLogic introduced its 8000 series of converged network adapters (CNAs) that support both Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

Along with NetApp, it also announced support for the Cisco Nexus 5000 series switches.

"EMC and QLogic share a customer-centric approach to supporting and qualifying emerging technologies like FCoE," said Barbara Robidoux, EMC veep of storage marketing. "Both EMC and QLogic are working together to help our mutual customers introduce Ethernet-based storage area networking into their data centers while preserving existing administrative tools and workflows."

Emulex too

Emulex introduced its own converged network adapters that supports FCoE and Ethernet.

The new LightPulse LP21000 series CNAs will be available this quarter. Emulex said it is collaborating with Cisco to ensure interoperability of the CNAs and the Nexus 5000.

Sheesh, everyone seems to have a crush on Cisco today. ®