The last bastion of proprietary networking is continuing to thrive within data centers. SANs based upon good old fashioned fibre channel still support 99% of the world’s storage resources. To their credit, fibre channel networks are extremely reliable, provide high performance, and are simple to administer. On the other hand, they are quite expensive (especially when compared to Ethernet), and they are truly isolated from the rest of the network.
 
Some new and evolutionary technologies are finally facilitating the convergence of SANs and traditional networks. In particular, data center bridging allows these two diverse networks to interoperate in data centers and share common networking resources. The attached white paper analyzes this technology. It shows several different bridging options, and discusses the pros and cons of each alternative. It also provides some useful topological diagrams, as well as detailed protocol information.

dcb white paper.pdf

Contact Enterprise Networks Solutions today for more information:  (480) 505-1111