FCIA continues to validate Fibre Channel advancements in multi-vendor testing

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), a non-profit international organization of manufacturers, systems integrators and vendors, announced the completion of the FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) Plugfest, which was held during the week of May 16th at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL).

Sponsored by the FCIA, the Plugfest provided an environment where leading Fibre Channel and Ethernet vendors came together to work in partnership on their respective FCoE products to ensure both interoperability and configurability between vendors. This Plugfest also focused on end-to-end tests that included FCoE with multiple FCFs (Fibre Channel Forwarders) and high availability configurations.

Participating companies in the Plugfest included ATTO Technology, Broadcom, Brocade, Chelsio, Cisco, Emulex, Extreme Networks, Hewlett-Packard, Ixia, JDSU, Mellanox Technologies, NetApp, QLogic and SANBlaze Technology.

"This FCoE Plugfest allowed numerous vendors to increase interoperability between 8Gb/s Fibre Channel products with FCoE products including FCoE Converged Network Adapters (CNAs), FCoE switches, FCoE bridges, Data Center Bridges (DCBs), DCB switches, FCoE storage systems, and blade-server offerings of Mezzanine cards and DCB switches. The Plugfest included new FCoE functionality that allowed multiple FCoE and DCB switches in the infrastructure," said Bill Martin, FCoE Plugfest chair and engineer consultant for the Office of Technology at Emulex. "This additional functionality allows the expansion of the FCoE infrastructure including high availability as well as insuring that Fibre Channel investments are protected with existing storage systems."

"The amount of commitment behind this week's Plugfest was exceptional," said Mark Jones, FCIA vice chairman. "As the Fibre Channel market continues to advance with new functionality – it will be mandatory that vendors provide solutions that are interoperable and compatible with existing installations. Fibre Channel products and solutions that are interoperable today will insure current investments into the future."