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FCoE Test Drive
On June 4 through June 6, 2008, the FCoE Test Drive event was held at the Manchester Hyatt in San Diego. Over 50 software engineers and developers from Cisco, CA, Data Direct Networks, EMC, FalconStor, Finisar, HP, Infortrend, LSI, Microsoft, NetApp, Promise, QLogic and Symantec tested their hardware and software on an FCoE network at the event.
The FCoE Test Drive was an enormous success.
 “In our opinion, FCoE is a technology that is ready to be tested by those customers that want to run their LAN and storage traffic over a single, 10-Gbps converged fabric. Although the specification is not quite final, and there are some minor protocol issues to be resolved, we believe that remaining issues will be resolved relatively quickly. We have run applications in an FCoE environment and found that the applications ran correctly and were unaware of the underlying hardware interfaces. While we understand that enterprise infrastructures change slowly, over a period of years, we believe that, over a relatively short time, FCoE will take its place as a viable, stable enterprise-ready protocol, especially as enterprises consider and deploy 10-Gbps Enhanced Ethernet networks.” - Dennis Martin, Demartek
Chronological summary of the FCoE Test Drive
Tuesday, June 3rd – The pre-event infrastructure team arrived in San Diego. The team went to work and configured the event room with partner test areas, dressing and signage. Network and power cables were distributed to the test areas. Cisco and QLogic network equipment was unpacked, powered up and integrated into a multi-protocol network. Servers with CNAs were added into the network for software-level application testing.
Wednesday, June 4th – Partners’ servers and storage started arriving in the morning and were staged within the partner test areas. CNAs, OSs & applications were added to servers and they were integrated into the network. Zones were created on the switches and primary and secondary storage attached. Application-level testing started during the afternoon. Throughout the afternoon, additional servers and storage were added to the network. By early evening, all partners were integrated and testing their hardware and/or software applications.
The FCoE participants shared dinner that night with Dennis Martin, President of Demartek, a firm focusing on industry analysis and lab validation testing, provided a Key Note address to the audience. This event helped to increase the level of cooperation between the engineers and helped to establish new technical relationships within the FCoE development ecosystem.
Thursday, June 5th – All of the partners’ applications, servers and storage were running on the network. Primary application testing was continued and 2nd & 3rd-level applications were starting to test. Finisar had integrated their analyzers to the network and were monitoring both Enhanced Ethernet and Fibre Channel traffic.
Friday, June 6th – Interoperability and application level testing continued using various tools, including Medusa Lab Testing Tools, IOMeter, an open source I/O load generator, to run basic I/O tests. In addition, each of the backup software vendors ran their own backup and recovery software, including backup and recovery tasks using data in native, compressed and encrypted formats. For the most part, the testers said that their applications worked as expected from the host servers. Some of the device-specific applications found issues that need some additional work.
Conclusion
While some device-specific issues were found, the test drive was a successful first step in confirming the promise of FCoE as a true Converged Network that is simpler and more cost-effective. This is because the operational model for FCoE is 100-percent compatible with both existing software and the operational model for native Fibre Channel. This means that in the future, IT professionals will be able to easily migrate their infrastructure onto a single, converged enhanced Ethernet network, while protecting and maintaining the stability of their investment in native Fibre Channel and Ethernet products and training.
At this milestone event, Cisco, CA, Data Direct Networks, EMC, FalconStor, Finisar, HP, Infortrend, LSI, Microsoft, NetApp, Promise, QLogic and Symantec achieved their goal of kick-start interoperability testing and validating the compatibility of FCoE with Fibre Channel. Many of the participants also felt that this was a great opportunity to exercise their products in preparation for the September 15th, 2008, FCIA Fibre Channel over Ethernet plug-fest.
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