Converging SAN and LAN Infrastructure with Fibre Channel over Ethernet for Efficient, Cost-Effective Date Centers

Converging SAN and LAN Infrastructure with Fibre Channel over Ethernet for Efcient, Cost-Effective Data Centers Page 6
Deployment Considerations for Unied
Data Center Fabric
As discussed here, a hallmark of FCoE design (and a core
strategy to help ensure its adoption) is its capability to be
deployed incrementally within existing environments, minimizing
disruption of the deploying organization while helping ensure
maximum benet. For this reason, FCoE is engineered specically
to coexist with existing topologies, such as traditional Ethernet,
Fibre Channel, and iSCSI. To deliver additional exibility, FCoE
provides two distinct deployment scenarios, which implementers
can combine, if needed, to ease the transition.
Flexible Deployment Options
The rst of these deployment scenarios is the general case where
both SAN and LAN I/O are passed over a single network interface
card (NIC), as shown in Figure 4. Here, a single 10 Gigabit
Ethernet network supports both types of trafc, simplifying the
environment and enabling cost efciencies.
Figure 4. FCoE enables unied Ethernet networking, passing
SAN and LAN trafc over a single 10 Gigabit Ethernet NIC.
FCoE
Switch
LAN
SAN
Unified
Ethernet
Networking
10GbE with
FCoE
EthernetFCoE Fibre Channel
As an alternative to the typical single-NIC model of FCoE
deployment, servers can pass LAN and SAN trafc over separate
10 Gigabit Ethernet NICs, as shown in Figure 5. This scenario is
appropriate for some organizations that want to obtain many of
the advantages of the FCoE topology, but who need to physically
separate the two networks, for example for organizational or
regulatory reasons.
This second deployment option enables organizations to
segment LAN and SAN trafc at the physical layer, as opposed
to using virtual LANs (VLANs) or the user priority groups that are
enabled by FCoE. This approach can have positive implications
for organizations that rely on such physical segmentation to
control network trafc or load balance the network, as well as for
industries such as healthcare and nancial services, where it may
be used to achieve regulatory compliance.
Figure 5. FCoE supports the passing of SAN and LAN trafc over
separate 10 Gigabit Ethernet NICs.
FCoE
Switch
LAN
SAN
Separate
LAN and SAN
Ethernet
Networking
10GbE with
FCoE
EthernetFCoE Fibre Channel