This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

Using Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and related technologies, data centers can consolidate data traffic onto a single network switch, simplifying their environments, promoting virtualization, and substantially reducing power and cooling costs. This emerging technology is drawing immense excitement, but few enterprise IT decision-makers and implementers truly understand it. I/O Consolidation in the Data Center is the only complete, up-to-date guide to FCoE. FCoE innovators Silvano Gai and Claudio DeSanti (chair of the T11 FCoE standards working group) systematically explain the technology: its benefits, tradeoffs, and what it will take to implement it successfully in production environments. Unlike most other discussions of FCoE, this book fully reflects the final, recently-approved industry standard. The authors also present five detailed case studies illustrating typical FCoE adoption scenarios, as well as an extensive Q and A section addressing the issues enterprise IT professionals raise most often. This is a fully updated version of Silvano Gai's privately-published book on FCoE, written for leading FCoE pioneer Nuova Systems before the company was acquired by Cisco. Nearly 12,000 copies of that book have already been distributed, demonstrating the immense interest in FCoE technology, and the scarcity of reliable information that has existed about it.

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explains FCoE in detail - 2009-09-26
Reviewer Rating:
The consolidation referred to by the book takes place inside a data center, where crucial assumptions can be made about short cabling lengths and the existence of reliable hardware, ie. very low bit rate losses over the distances inside the center. The authors describe briefly existing network choices, like iSCSI and Infiniband. What they advocate is Fibre Channel over Ethernet [FCoE]. This allows for a unified network inside the center, and concomitant savings in hardware and system maintenance.

Much of the book is taken up with explaining FCoE, like its architectural models. The details can get somewhat involved, even though the book deliberately omits some information. A major simplifying concept to understand is that FCoE uses encapsulation of a FC payload. With no fragmenting, there is thus no need for reassembly and all that this implies in complexity. [By close analogy, think of what TCP has to do when it reassembles packets.] Which also speeds up FCoE processing, aiding low latency demands.

The most intricate descriptions seem to be about combining FCoE with virtualisation. The latter is now a hot topic within data centers, and making this work with FCoE is nontrivial.

The book does not claim that FCoE will entirely supplant existing alternatives like iSCSI, but suggests that these might be pushed out to non-data center usages.

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