Fibre Channel technology, which has been available since 1988, is undergoing its next evolution with the recent doubling of the speed of 8 Gbps to 16 Gbps. Fibre Channel (FC) emerged as a way to move data from central servers to large adjacent storage systems.

The specification of 16 Gbps was completed in the fall of 2011. In addition to increased speed, new standard features include: low energy use, compatibility with previous versions of the standard, 60 percent to double improvements in storage area network density, 60 percent for double virtual machine I/O channels per port, and use fewer PCIe slots than the previous version of the standard.

Virtualization Architecture Needs Transformation

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Most IT architects are now extending their server virtualization initiatives in an effort to generate dramatically higher I/O traffic rates and higher virtualization density. Today servers are running twenty-five virtual machines per server, and as density on servers grow, storage problems can quickly appear.

Not to mention, as the world shifts to cloud computing, companies are moving out of dispersed systems into centralized data centers. As information becomes more concentrated, companies move large volumes of data over short distances rather small volumes of data over long distances, and therefore need more bandwidth in the data center.

Furthermore, more virtual machines being added to physical servers and with these servers running disk I/O-intensive production applications, such as messaging, the server and storage technologies become faster and can therefore lead to tension in the connections.

To keep up with the I/O pace, virtualized environments require a larger I/O pipe beyond the performance supported by current FC infrastructures. The shift to 16 Gb FC architecture will gain traction because vendors are trying to grapple with the issues caused by spanning tree protocols that limit scalability and forces complex multi-layer IP networks. 16 Gb FC offers the necessary bandwidth as well as the advanced features sets, such as partitioning and QoS.

Why is 16Gb FC a Winner?

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Most surveys are finding storage networks based on Fibre Channel (FC) to still be the most common protocol in use in data centers for sharing storage. A recent Wikibon survey of VMware customers shows that FC is the most popular network protocol for virtualized systems. IDC estimates that storage capacity driven by services and applications is forecast to increase 8X from 1000 Exabytes to 8000 Exabytes between 2010 and 2015. Gartner estimates the asset value of FC installed infrastructure stood at over $50 billion and move to new 16GFC technology will be new standard to meet new IT demands.

Certainly Ethernet’s dominance is indisputable, used for everything from connecting users, servers and storage. But thanks to technologies like solid state storage, desktop virtualization, and server virtualization, performance of the storage network is suddenly a challenge for almost every sized data center that can justify a SAN.

A virtualized server, with multiple workloads, demands increased storage I/O bandwidth and improved latency performance. The introduction of Intel’s Xeon(r) E5 Romley multi-core processors increases virtualization density, resulting in an increase in storage I/O bandwidth.

With the advent of new multi-core processors, flash solid state disk (SSD) arrays and more pervasive cloud deployments, today’s storage administrators are under pressure to increase data storage requirements and improve efficiency due to the trend of growing virtualized data centers. 16GFC is the ideal SAN technology for hosting and servicing high-density virtual machines (VMs) due to their requirement for extremely low-latency, highly deterministic shared storage in addition to support for prolific applications, server virtualization, multi-core processors, more memory, solid state drives, PCIe Gen 3, traffic aggregation, and VDI.

16Gb FC gives storage admin more storage I/O bandwidth than most environments can take advantage of. Deploying 16GFC not only preserves the dedicated FC network to deliver the required performance of mission critical applications, but is also future-proofed.  Higher speed 16GFC reduces the number of expensive HBAs and switch ports required to achieve similar performance.

The other benefits of 16GFC include reduced CAPEX and OPEX on a future-proof technology platform, optimized storage networking for multiple applications including data replication/ backup, video streaming and VDI.

Recent 16Gb Developments

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When it comes to Fibre Channel products, there are a limited number of suppliers in each market segment. Brocade has been aggressively pushing the Fibre Channel switches to 16Gbps. Cisco has had its share of the market as well, saying there is a lot of customer demand for these products. Cisco has been much more proactive in promoting the movement of products Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and to fit more neatly with their legacy Fibre Channel systems.

But things get more competitive in other segments of the Fibre Channel market.  Vendors such as Broadcom and Emulex have begun delivering 16 Gbps Fibre Channel. The new Emulex 16GFC single-port and dual-port host bus adapters (HBAs) for IBM System provide better performance, as well as streamlined management and backward compatibility for virtualized environments.

Storage vendors like EMC, NetApp and QLogic have also begun adding Fibre Channel support to their devices. Using QLogic’s Adaptive Convergence technology, a single PCIe slot in the server can be used over the lifetime of the server to supporting Fibre Channel SANs and converged networks. QLogic Adapters FlexSuite combines support for 16 Gb Fibre Channel with 10 Gb Ethernet on the same hardware (learn more about QLogic’s latest developments in Fibre Channel here). These vendors are also taking advantage of the latest enhancements in both VMware vSphere 5.1 and Windows Server 2012 with features such as Quality of Service (QoS) and NPIV to support and optimize heterogeneous environments, multiprotocol I/O, higher levels of virtualization, and cloud computing deployments.

Fibre Channel infrastructure will continue to grow and to dominate the enterprise storage interconnects market with time-tested reliability, performance and enterprise-class features. Data center consolidation and extensive use of virtualization and cloud deployment are driving the need for higher bandwidth and higher 16GFC, while the virtualization architect also has wide variety of tested tools at his disposal to create a scalable and flexible data center.

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