Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a protocol standard ratified in June of 2009. FCoE provides the tools for encapsulation of Fibre Channel (FC) in 10 Gigabit Ethernet frames. The purpose of FCoE is to allow consolidation of low-latency, high performance FC networks onto 10GE infrastructures. This allows for a…
Year: 2010
What is the biggest barrier to your move into the cloud?
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What's Stopping cloud?
So with everyone talking about cloud and all of the benefits of cloud computing why isn’t everyone diving in? The barriers to adoption can be classified into three major categories: Personal, Technical, and Business. Personal Reasons: Personal barriers to cloud adoption are broad ranging and can be quite difficult to…
Data Center Bridging Exchange
Data Center Bridging Exchange (DCBX) is one of the components of the DCB standards. These standards offer enhancements to standard ethernet which are backwards compatible with traditional Ethernet and provide support for I/O Consolidation (http://www.definethecloud.net/?p=18.) The three purposes of DCBX are: Discovery of DCB capability: The ability for DCB capable…
Technical Drivers for Cloud Computing
In a previous post I’ve described the business drivers for Cloud Computing infrastructures (http://www.definethecloud.net/?p=27.) Basically the idea of transforming data center from a cost center into a profit center. In this post I’ll look at the underlying technical challenges that cloud looks to address in order to reduce data center…
Storage Protocols
Storage is a major consideration for cloud initiatives; what type of disk, which vendor, and as importantly which protocol? Experts will tout one over the other based on cost, performance, throughput, etc. Let’s take a look at the major storage protocols at play in the data center: Small Computer System…
Virtualization
While not a new concept virtualization has hit the main stream over the last few years and become a uncontrollable buzz word driven by VMware, and other server virtualization platforms. Virtualization has been around in many forms for much longer than some realizes, things like Logical partitions (LPAR) on IBM…
Data Center Bridging
Data Center Bridging (DCB) is a group of IEEE standard protocols designed to support I/O consolidation. DCB enables multiple protocols with very different requirements to run over the same Layer 2 10 Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure. Because DCB is currently discussed along with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) it’s not uncommon…
Business Drivers for Cloud Infrastructures
There are several business challenges that drive the cloud discussion and cloud infrastructure market. These business challenges are very different from the technical challenges that are more commonly discussed along with cloud. It’s key to differentiate between the two because typically only one or the other is relevant to any…
Consolidated I/O
Consolidated I/O (input/output) is a hot topic and has been for the last two years, but it’s not a new concept. We’ve already consolidated I/O once in the data center and forgotten about it, remember those phone PBXs before we replaced them with IP Telephony? The next step in consolidating…