This tactic address one key failing of ISCSI. Specifically an ISCSI interface running at 400 megabit will take 16% of a 3 ghz 64 bit cpu while using a software initiator or target. This can create some interesting issues where you don’t want to have them. By removing the layer3 information, and transposing fibre channel commands over the Ethernet transport a major cpu hit is avoided.

My gut feel is that this technology will follow a similar track as ISCSI did. ISCSI had a very low adoption in the first 3 years. Storage guys are naturally timid, as there are stiff consequences for failure, but eventually engineers warmed up to ISCSI and started deploying it where it was most appropriate, in lower bandwidth utilization hosts. FCOE will follow this same path, however this time we won’t have to fight the FUD of storage of a network transport. What is in FCOE’s favor is that as a protocol it is optimized for the general ISCSI setup of flat layer two transport between target and initiator.

That all being said, we are going to have to see some product releases from Cisco and Intel for FCOE to really take off. If we don’t, then FCOE will fall down the same hole that ATA over Ethernet disappeared down.

Colin McNamara
CCIE #18233 (Storage Networking)
2 Cups Solutions
“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer”

References -

Intel Project Page

Colin McNamara
CCIE #18233

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

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• Will Cisco succede where Sun has failed?

--Colin McNamara

Fibre Channel over Ethernet is taking off

”

By Ivan Pepelnjak

John S. Pumphrey recently asked an interesting question: “Can the router send an e-mail when an interface goes down?” The enterprisey solution is obvious: deploy a high-end EMS to collect SNMP traps and use its API to write a custom module that would use a MQ interface to alert the operator. Fortunately, Event Manager applets in Cisco IOS provide action mail command (available in 12.3(14)T and 12.4) that can send an e-mail to a SMTP server straight from the router.

There are two ways you can detect that an interface went down with EEM: either you track the interface status with a track object and start an EEM applet when the track object changes state or you catch the syslog messages reporting that the interface line protocol changed state to down. The second approach is obviously more generic, as a single applet can act on multiple interfaces.

event manager applet MailOnIfDown event syslog occurs 1 →    pattern "LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN.*to down" →    period 1

Notes:

• If you want to limit the applet to serial interfaces only, you could change the pattern to LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN.*Serial.*to down.
• The → continuation character is used to indicate that a single configuration line has been split to increase readability.

The action mail command specifies the mail server‘s address (use a hostname and DNS lookup or ip host configuration command to make the EEM applet more generic), from and to address, message subject and body. In each of these fields, you can use EEM environment variables that you can define with the event manager environment configuration command. Each EEM event also defines a few environment variables that you can use (see the table of EEM system-defined variables on CCO). For example, you can define the e-mail recipient in the router’s configuration and use the _syslog_msg variable to include the syslog message in the e-mail body:

event manager environment _ifDown_rcpt admin@lab.com!event manager applet MailOnIfDown event syslog occurs 1 →    pattern "LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN.*to down" →    period 1 action 1.0 mail server "mail-gw" →    to "$_ifDown_rcpt" from "R1@lab.com" →    subject "Interface down on R1" →    body "$_syslog_msg"

You can make the applet even more generic with the help of action info type routername command, which stores the current router’s name into the $_info_routername environment variable:

event manager environment _ifDown_rcpt admin@lab.com!event manager applet MailOnIfDown event syslog occurs 1 →    pattern "LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN.*to down" →    period 1 action 1.0 info type routername action 2.0 mail server "mail-gw" →    to "$_ifDown_rcpt" from "$_info_routername@lab.com" →    subject "Interface down on $_info_routername" →    body "$_syslog_msg"

"

Colin McNamara
CCIE #18233

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Routers can email you when they go down

This news is interesting as it shows that Cisco is continuing their push into the application layer.
Its Application Oriented Networking blade directly competes with IBM. The content services switch competes with Sun, F5, Juniper and Netscaler. If Cisco can bring a distributed backend to the market that integrates smoothly with the middleware solutions they are currently proposing it will be unstopable. Anybody care to jump on this bandwagon?

–Colin
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

Colin McNamara
CCIE #18233

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Will Cisco succede where Sun has failed?