Sea. (Converged Enhanced Ethernet)

While it hasn't been covered in any great detail on storage blogs I did get a question about FC over Ethernet so it might be time to take a quick pass at it.

What we're really talking about when we say FC over Ethernet is FC over CEE (Pronounced Sea), or Converged Enhanced Ethernet. CEE is an effort to extend the Ethernet spec to add new functionality and resiliency so it can be used for forms of traffic beyond what it's used for today. The ultimate aim of what we're talking about here is the ability to collapse three or more different types of Fabric (LAN, SAN, and IPC) into a single Fabric.

What's driving this? Well 10GigE for a start. Even though it costs a couple of grand per port at the moment that number will start dropping like a stone as time moves on, and without CEE there will be this high bandwidth infrastructure which is only useful for specific forms of traffic. Nuts to that. Now's the time to begin making modifications so that we can get as much of our other traffic on 10GigE as is possible.

I'm sure people are wondering why bother with FC over Converged Enhanced Ethernet when we already have things like iSCSI or InfiniBand. Lets face facts InfiniBand required people to start from scratch, no problem if you're starting from scratch as it is but a big problem if it's a case of rip and replace. IB has been a non-starter for a while and it could be the biggest loser if customers begin to adopt CEE.

Okay, but iSCSI is finally taking off why not just stick with that? The problem with iSCSI is that if you have an FC SAN there's probably a lot of FC management tools and hardware you've invested in which just isn't applicable in iSCSI's Ethernet only world. FC and iSCSI don't "run together", they run in parallel to each other and tend to be managed as such. So here comes FCoCEE to give your FC SAN the ability to extend out onto Ethernet which has been enhanced with features as to negate the best effort delivery nature of Ethernet and allow for traffic differentiation, congestion control, and so on. We're not talking about FC-IP either that's a long distance solution and there isn't the overlap you think there might be as FCoCEE is a single subnet solution, your data center being that subnet. When you'd jump subnets or shoot out across the Internet is where FC-IP would come in.

So how far along are we? In reality probably further than we all expect. Patents have been filed, silicon has been cut and chances are that trademarks are being dreamed up as I'm typing this. I don't expect this to get stuck in committee hell as a lot of the principals want to see this on the starting line as soon as possible. 10GigE appears to be the green light so they'll want things ready for when the price normalizes.

To conclude our very quick look at FCoCEE, the naysayers looked at FC's recent inactivity and declared it to be dead. In reality it was cocooned and in the process of evolving.