Table Of ContentI/O Consolidation
in the Data Center
A Complete Guide to Data Center Ethernet
and Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Silvano Gai
Claudio DeSanti
Cisco Press
800 East 96th Street
Indianapolis, Indiana 46240 USA
I/O Consolidation in the Data Center
A Complete Guide to Data Center Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Silvano Gai, Claudio DeSanti
Copyright© 2010 Cisco Systems, Inc.
Published by:
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About the Authors: Silvano Gai
Silvano Gai, who grew up in a small village near Asti, Italy, has more than 27 years of experience
in computer engineering and computer networks. He is the author of several books and techni-
cal publications on computer networking and multiple Internet Drafts and RFCs. He is respon-
sible for 30 issued patents and 50 patent applications. His background includes 7 years as a full
professor of computer engineering, tenure track, at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, and seven years
as a researcher at the CNR (Italian National Council for Scientifi c Research). For the past 12
years, he has been in Silicon Valley where, in the position of Cisco Fellow, he was an architect
of the Cisco Catalyst family of network switches, of the Cisco MDS family of storage network-
ing switches, and of the Nexus family of data center switches. Silvano teaches a course on I/O
Consolidation, Data Center Ethernet, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet at Stanford University
(see http://scpd.stanford.edu/certifi cates/fcoe).
About the Authors: Claudio DeSanti
Claudio DeSanti is a Distinguished Engineer in the Advanced Architectures & Research orga-
nization at Cisco. He represents Cisco in several National and International Standards Bodies,
such as INCITS Technical Committee T11, IEEE 802.1, IETF, and in industry associations. He
is vice chairman of the INCITS T11 Technical Committee, chairperson of various working
groups, including FC-BB-5, where FCoE has been developed, and technical editor of differ-
ent standards, including IEEE 802.1Qbb, where Priority-based Flow Control is defi ned. He is
author of several patents and international publications, including ten RFCs in IETF and other
standards in the American National Standard Institute. He received many honors and awards,
including the INCITS 2008 Technical Excellence Award, the INCITS 2007 Team Award, and the
INCITS 2006 Gene Milligan Award for Effective Committee Management. Claudio’s research
interests include network protocols, storage networking, routing, and security. He holds a Ph.D.
in computer engineering from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy.
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Dedications
To my parents, who raised and bore me,
to my friends, who cherished me,
and, above all,
to the girl I love.
—Claudio
To my wife Antonella, the love of my life.
—Silvano
Acknowledgments
We wish to express our thanks to the Nuova Systems and Cisco executive teams who made this
book possible.
A particular thanks goes to the many engineers and marketing folks with whom we have col-
laborated in the recent years to develop the technologies described in this book.
We credit and appreciate Garth O’Mara, Carlos Pereira, and Landon Curt Noll for their exten-
sive reviews of this book.
A special thanks goes to Luca Cafi ero, the father of FCoE.
Our gratitude goes to Mario Mazzola, who has been our mentor and friend for all these years.
Contents
I/O Consolidation 1
Introduction 1
What Is I/O Consolidation 2
Merging the Requirements 3
Why I/O Consolidation Has Not Yet Been Successful 4
Fundamental Technologies 5
PCI-Express 5
10 Gigabit Ethernet 5
Additional Requirements 8
Buffering Requirements 8
Layer 2 Only 9
Switch Architecture 9
Low Latency 10
Native Support for Storage Traffi c 11
RDMA Support 11
Enabling Technologies 15
Introduction 15
Lossless Ethernet 15
PAUSE 15
Credits Versus PAUSE 17
PAUSE Propagation 18
Is Lossless Better? 19
Why PAUSE Is Not Widely Deployed 20
Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) 20
Additional Components 22
DCBX: Data Center Bridging eXchange 22
Bandwidth Management 23
Congestion Management 25
Delayed Drop 26
Going Beyond Spanning Tree 28
Active-Active Connectivity 32
Etherchannel 32
Virtual Switching System (VSS) 32
virtual Port Channel (vPC) 34
Ethernet Host Virtualizer 36
