FCIA Announces the Successful Completion of its 41st Interoperability Plugfest

MINNEAPOLIS - March 7, 2024 - PRLog -- As another affirmation of the continued innovation of the Fibre Channel (FC) standard and reinforcing its status as the industry's most reliable and robust storage networking transport protocol, the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) announced the completion of an industry plugfest to ensure functionality and interoperability of 64GFC Gen 7 products. The plugfest was held during the week of October 23rd, 2023, at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL) with 10 companies participating.

"The FCIA members companies and guests were thrilled to return to the UNH-IOL to conduct our 41^st  industry plugfest to validate the continued development of the latest FC technologies," said Mark Jones, president emeritus, FCIA. "After five days of intensive lab testing, all participants came away with an assurance of industry-wide interoperability for 64GFC Gen 7 products that are now emerging in the marketplace."

The results of this plugfest provides assurance to the Fibre Channel SAN community that the latest 64GFC specification meets the needs of flash storage technologies.  The event was also notable for providing the first multi-vendor testing of the latest Fabric Notification features, as well as the first multi-vendor 64GFC over DWDM demonstration.

Key test accomplishments from the plugfest include:

• Physical conformance to FC Physical Interface-7 (FC-PI-7)
• 64GFC transceiver conformance testing
• 64GFC, 32GFC, and 16GFC interoperability and backwards compatibility
• Multi-topology use case conformance
• 64GFC to 64GFC fabric over DWDM
• Large multi-vendor and high availability redundant fabric conformance
• Multi-Vendor Fabric Notification testing of FPIN-CN, FPIN-LI, FPIN-PN, FPIN-DN
• UNH IOL INTERACT v20 NVMe conformance testing
• Multiple vendor FC-NVMe initiator and target interface operations
• I/O validation over direct-connect and switched fabric topologies
• Concurrent NVMe and legacy SCSI traffic
• Backward compatibility with previous FC speeds, fiber optics, and fiber cables
• Packet inspection using updated industry tools

The nine participating companies were:

• Amphenol Corporation
• Broadcom Inc.
• Cisco Systems
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise
• Marvell
• SANBlaze Technology, Inc.
• Teledyne LeCroy, Inc.
• Adtran Inc.
• EXFO Inc.
• UNH-IOL

"FCIA-sponsored plugfests continue to allow participants to validate interoperability of FC products including backward compatibility of FC products at 32GFC and 16GFC to new Gen7 64GFC and self-healing fabric notification capabilities," said Barry Maskas, FC plugfest chair, and storage network consultant at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. "We are also excited to see wide participation with industry standardization of FC-NVMe-2 as validated by the breadth of participants in our NVMeoF INTERACT V20 test track.  We can see that the methodology for interoperability and compatibility that has been proven successful by the participating FC companies, allows customers to grow their storage infrastructure and take advantage of speed and functional improvements."

To learn more about 64G Fibre Channel Gen 7 and the FCIA plugfest, please visit the FCIA website at www.fibrechannel.org/.