Fibre Channel Continues to be the Most Trusted SAN Connectivity of Choice; Gen 6 FC-NVMe Maturity Demonstrated at the Fourth FC-NVMe Focused Plugfest

MINNEAPOLIS - Aug. 2, 2018 - PRLog -- After more than 20 years in the marketplace, Fibre Channel (FC) continues to be the most trusted Storage Area Network (SAN) connectivity of choice in leading data centers. Highlighting the popularity of the technology, the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) just completed its fourth multi-vendor plugfest focused on FC-NVMe and Gen 6 FC.

"With over 120 Million ports shipped, Fibre Channel has proven a unique edge over other networking technologies in terms of rock-solid reliability, unmatched predictable performance, and massive scalability," said Mark Jones, president and chairman of the board, FCIA, and director, Technical Marketing and Performance, Broadcom Inc. "FCIA plugfests are a key factor in proving new Fibre Channel technologies and products have the T11 standards conformance and interoperability that storage networking customers have come to expect."

Plugfest Focused on FC-NVMe

With 13 companies participating, FCIA completed its fourth multi-vendor plugfest focused on the FC-NVMe standard and Gen 6 FC compatibility the week of July 23, 2018, in Milpitas, California. Hosted by Austin Labs utilizing data center-proven test methods and tools, the plugfest featured conformance, interoperability, multi-pathing, blade servers' utilization of NVMe over FCoE, high-availability SANs, and error injection testing of FC-NVMe concurrently with Gen 6 FC.

Key accomplishments from this fourth FCIA-sponsored plugfest of FC-NVMe include:

- Testing of commercially available enterprise market storage arrays with FC-NVMe

- Multiple vendor initiator, switch and target FC and FC-NVMe conformance and interoperability

- Gen 6 fabric connectivity to a variety of market available NVMe drives

- Data integrity validation over multi-vendor direct-connect and switched multi-hop fabric topologies

- Error injection tests to validate correct FC-NVMe and FC recovery and data integrity

- Concurrent FC-NVMe and FC through the same initiator, fabric, and target ports

- Successful demonstration of Gen 6 FC active optical cables (FC-AOCs)

The 13 participating companies in the plugfest:

Amphenol Corporation Broadcom, Inc. Brocade Broadcom, Inc. Emulex Cisco Systems, Inc. MDS Cisco Systems, Inc. UCS Data Center Systems (DCS) Dell EMC

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Marvell Technology Group Ltd., Cavium QLogic NetApp Inc. SANBlaze Technology, Inc. Teledyne LeCroy, Inc. Viavi Solutions Inc.

Flash Memory Summit FCIA Booth #828

FCIA is a Bronze sponsor at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California August 7-9, 2018.

FCIA's FC-NVMe demonstration will showcase a number of proof points that illustrate why FC is the right choice for transporting NVMe over Fabrics:

- Significant reduction of FC latency

- Multi-Protocol storage area network (SAN) communication that eases data mobility between existing FC storage resources and NVMe over FC storage

- Concurrent NVMe and SCSI transport managed using existing FC fabric resources

- Tools to build and validate the NVMe datacenter – NVMe over FC traffic capture and NVMe decoding

Stop by the FCIA booth at Flash Memory Summit and ask for a copy of the 2018 edition of the Fibre Channel Solutions Guide, also available online at https://fibrechannel.org beginning August 7.

FCIA members participating in the booth are:

Amphenol Corporation ATTO Technology Broadcom, Inc. Brocade Broadcom, Inc. Emulex

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Marvell Technology Group Ltd., Cavium QLogic SANBlaze Technology, Inc. Teledyne LeCroy, Inc. Viavi Solutions Inc.

Leading Panel of Experts

The FCIA is also hosting Session 302A-1 at Flash Memory Summit on Thursday, August 9, 2:10 pm. – 3:25 p.m. titled "Ultra-Fast NVMe Storage Networks for Next Generation Flash Arrays." Moderated by Mark Jones, Director, Technical Marketing & Performance, Broadcom Inc. and President, FCIA, the following panel of data storage experts will examine how NVMe fits into the data center using popular storage networking protocols:

- Curt Beckmann, Product Architect for NVMe over FC, Broadcom Inc.

- Craig Carlson, Board Member, FCIA; Technologist, Marvell, Cavium QLogic

- Dennis Martin, Founder/President, Demartek

- Rupin Mohan, Board Member, FCIA; Director, R&D, Chief Technologist (SAN), HPE

- David Rodgers, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Teledyne LeCroy

"Fibre Channel is engineered to meet the demands for enterprise data centers that require rock-solid reliability, high performance and scalability," said Dennis Martin, founder and President, Demartek and a FCIA panelist at FMS. "The FC-NVMe technology is on track to becoming as interoperable and reliable as previous generations of Fibre Channel, while vastly improving performance for the next generation all-flash datacenters."

About FCIA

The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) is a non-profit international organization whose sole purpose is to act as the independent technology and marketing voice of the Fibre Channel industry. We are committed to helping member organizations promote and position Fibre Channel, and to provide a focal point for Fibre Channel information, standards advocacy, and education. FCIA members include manufacturers, system integrators, developers, vendors, industry professionals, and end users. Our member-led working groups and committees focus on creating and championing the Fibre Channel technology roadmaps, targeting applications that include data storage, video, networking, and storage area network (SAN) management. For more info, go to http://www.fibrechannel.org.