FCoE

Intel's FCoE software is designed to run on Oracle's 10-gigabit PCIe family of server adapters. FCoE is the encapsulation of the standard Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) frames as data within standard Ethernet frames. This link-level encapsulation, teamed with an FCoE-aware Ethernet-to-FCP gateway, extends an FCP fabric to include Ethernet-based host connectivity.

Data Center Bridging

Data center bridging (DCB) is a collection of standards-based extensions to classical Ethernet protocols. DCB provides a lossless datacenter transport layer that enables the convergence of LANs and SANs onto a single unified fabric. In addition to supporting FCoE, other applications and protocols leverage these extensions to provide guaranteed bandwidth to traffic classes other than FCoE.

FCoE Topology

FCoE focuses on the encapsulation of frames that are specific to storage class traffic. However, as the following illustration shows, a typical FCoE infrastructure can encapsulate traffic from several sources.

Related Information

• Installation Overview (Linux)

• System Requirements

• OS Patches and Updates