Data center bridging

One area of evolution for Ethernet is to add extensions to the existing protocol suite to provide reliability without requiring the complexity of TCP.

With the move to 10 Gbit/s and faster transmission rates, there is also a desire for finer granularity in control of bandwidth allocation and to ensure it is used more effectively.

[1] DCB aims, for selected traffic, to eliminate loss due to queue overflow (sometimes called lossless Ethernet) and to be able to allocate bandwidth on links.

They are being (or have been) developed respectively by two separate standards bodies: Enabling DCB broadly on arbitrary networks with irregular topologies and without special routing may cause deadlocks, large buffering delays, unfairness and head-of-line blocking.

Products were being developed by companies such as Avaya, Brocade, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Emulex, HP, Huawei, IBM, and Qlogic.