Fibre Channel over Ethernet

Traditionally, data centers used both Ethernet for TCP/IP networks and Fibre Channel for SANs, each having different and mostly incompatible interfaces/connections and interconnects/wiring and thus requires separate cabling/wiring and interconnects such as switching hardware for each.

Since classical Ethernet had no priority-based flow control, unlike Fibre Channel, FCoE required enhancements to the Ethernet standard to support a priority-based flow control mechanism (to reduce frame loss from congestion).

The IEEE standards body added priorities in the data center bridging (dcb) Task Group.

FCoE encapsulation can be done in software with a conventional Ethernet network interface card, however FCoE CNAs offload (from the CPU) the low level frame processing and SCSI protocol functions traditionally performed by Fibre Channel host bus adapters.

Reserved bits are present to guarantee that the FCoE frame meets the minimum length requirement of Ethernet.

Its main goal is to discover and initialize FCoE capable entities connected to an Ethernet cloud.

In October 2007, the first public end-to-end FCoE demo occurred at Storage Network World including adapters from QLogic, switches from Nuova Systems, and storage from NetApp (none of the companies involved made any product announcements at the time).