Protocol wars: Can Fibre Channel survive Ethernet’s assault?
Although Fibre Channel is seeing single-digit growth rates, Ethernet for storage is exploding

“The goal is no longer to deploy and manage each element individually, but to build the optimal (e.g., densest, greenest, simplest) data center,” IDC wrote in its report “Worldwide Storage Networking Infrastructure for 2010 Through 2014.”

The underlying idea behind converged IT infrastructure is that companies want to deploy and manage IT assets in predefined “chunks” (e.g., a rack, an aisle or an entire data center) rather than as distinct products (e.g., servers, storage or network switches), according to IDC. Thanks to technologies like server and storage virtualization, these “chunks can then be allocated to support specific application sets. They can also be used much more efficiently,” IDC said.
Mazda makes a move

For example, Mazda’s North American Operations virtualized its application servers, cutting its server count from 300 physical machines to 33 VMware ESX host servers with 522 virtual machines (VM). The move reduced Mazda’s 2009-2010 IT budget by 30%, in large part by virtualizing nearly all of its applications, including IBM WebSphere, SAP, IBM UDB and SQL Server. But the virtualization project also caused storage network I/O bottlenecks because of all the added VMs.

“The backup times just kept growing, from six hours to eight hours all the way to 16 hours,” said Barry Blakeley, Mazda’s infrastructure architect for enterprise infrastructure. “In a workday, you can’t have a 16-hour backup window.”

So Mazda moved its 85TB of storage from NetApp arrays to Dell Compellent iSCSI storage arrays attached through 10GbE networks. Mazda chose a virtual backup product from Veeam Software, following Blakeley’s mantra for the project: “Keep it simple, stupid.”

“Once you deploy things correctly, you can get all the performance you need over iSCSI and you don’t need Fibre Channel,” he said.

Blakeley said the Veeam backup software, combined with a 10GbE network, helped open up his storage network bandwidth, dropping his backup windows to six hours and increasing backup performance to about 6Gbps. “The restore times were really quick too,” he added.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet

One networking protocol that’s gotten a big push — largely from Cisco — in recent years is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). While Cisco doesn’t break out sales figures for FCoE-enabled switches, the FCoE protocol was used in a little less than 10% of all SAN deployments last year, according to Stuart Miniman, an analyst at the Wikibon Project, a Web 2.0 community for IT professionals. Those figures, Miniman said, represent a tremendous success for FCoE.

“Most deployments of FCoE are in blade server environments; customers don’t need to think about the technology, it just works the way current SANs do,” he stated in a recent blog post.

Miniman previously worked in the EMC CTO’s office, where he was “an evangelist” for FCoE.

In contrast, Gartner’s Mushell said his research firm is not predicting robust growth for FCoE.

Zaffos echoed that view. “Does it improve data availability? No. Does it improve performance? No. Does it simplify the infrastructure? Potentially. Does it simplify management? Perhaps,” he said. “But it’s not changing how LUNs are created. It doesn’t change how they’re zoned or being allocated.”

Unlike iSCSI, FCoE still requires organizations to employ a Fibre Channel administrator to handle storage provisioning.

“When you look at simplifying an infrastructure, many users follow the [keep it simple, stupid] method and choose to keep separate LAN and SAN infrastructures,” he said. “If you’re keeping two separate environments… the simplification of the infrastructure [by using FCoE] may be ethereal.”

Miniman argues that FCoE is a great way for an enterprise storage team to begin the shift to a more Ethernet-centric environment while maintaining the data loss resiliency of Fibre Channel.

Miniman points out that organizations using FCoE tend to have infrastructures with more than 200 servers, and therefore have the budget for a fulltime Fibre Channel admin and need the robust nature of the protocol. “If there’s less than 200 servers, they tend to use iSCSI,” he said.

FCoE encapsulates Fibre Channel frames in Ethernet packets allowing for server I/O consolidation. In an FCoE environment, converged network adapter cards (CNA) replace both NICs and HBAs. An FCoE-enabled switch then provides connectivity to both an existing LAN and a back-end SAN.

Bob Fine, product marketing director for Dell Compellent, argues that iSCSI can also be used in combination with the more robust Lossless Ethernet and asks, “So what’s the advantage to FCoE?”

Yet a little more than half of all Dell Compellent SAN ports remain Fibre Channel.

“I’d also say most of our customers are using multiple protocols. Very few are only using one,” he said. “That’s a nice thing about giving customers a technology choice. They can choose what technology is good for them.”

Sitting among Storage Networking World (SNW) attendees last month, Rod Patrick, lead IT systems engineer at Atmos Energy, was one of three people to raise his hand when a speaker asked the audience whether anyone was using FCoE for server-to-storage connectivity.

That was an improvement over last year, when Patrick was the only one to raise his hand.

“Even to this day I think we were early on in the game for FCoE,” he said. “It wasn’t totally without incidents or pain… but we’ve been very glad to be on the leading edge.”
Atmos Energy consolidates its network

Atmos Energy, one of the largest natural gas distributors in the U.S., built a brand new data center two and a half years ago. That allowed the company to start from scratch in consolidating its network infrastructure.

“It was mainly about cost and simplicity of the design,” said Patrick, who was hired about six months after the new data center was built. “You’re saving all sorts of gear as far as top-of-rack. So instead of having to run Fibre everywhere and Ethernet, you obviously just run Ethernet. It’s a shared path.”

Atmos had been using a combination of 2Gbps, 4Gbps and 8Gbps Fibre Channel for its SAN. Including three primary storage arrays, several midrange arrays and its archives, the company stores about 1 petabyte of data.

The company runs about 1,000 servers, 60% of which are virtualized. All of its virtual machines run over FCoE, as do about 100 physical machines that support higher-end databases.
Atmos deploys VDI

Microsoft MCTS Certification, MCITP Certification and over 2000+
Exams with Life Time Access Membership at https://www.actualkey.com

About a year and a half ago, Atmos deployed a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) that includes about 500 terminals in two call centers. Its VDI, based on VMware View, also runs over FCoE.

To help with VDI-related boot storms in the morning, Patrick and his team installed about 10TB of solid-state storage on the primary, high-end storage arrays to boost performance.

The company uses CNAs on its blade servers, which allow it to run both typical LAN data traffic over Ethernet and storage traffic using FCoE. But the company has yet to run the FCoE all the way to its back-end storage.

The Fibre Channel storage arrays are connected to Cisco MDS switches, which are Fibre Channel only. Those MDS switches connect to Cisco Nexus 5000 switches, which connect to blade servers using FCoE.

“We are looking at FCoE direct-connect options to eliminate the [Cisco] MDS switches eventually, but that is a few years away probably,” Patrick said.

Patrick also said he wouldn’t be opposed to deploying iSCSI or NFS (network file system) as his IP-over-Ethernet storage protocol in the future, but he experienced problems in the past with regard to high-end storage performance needs.

For his virtual machine file system data, Patrick said he wanted to use a “more proven standard.”

“I’m kind of old school when it comes to Fibre Channel,” he said.

Forrester’s Reichmann has no doubt how the tension between Fibre Channel and Ethernet will get resolved. Despite its adherents, Fibre Channel is on a long slow slide toward obscurity.

“In the long run, Ethernet is going to win,” he said. “How long it’s going to take to get there is unclear.”

Microsoft Commptia A+ Training , Comptia A+ Certification and over 2000+
Exams with Life Time Access Membership at https://www.actualkey.com