Video by Stephen Foskett (thank you)
Part 2 of the Virtual Symposium turns to the topic of convergence. The delegates discuss the core questions of convergence:
- What’s stopping convergence and what’s driving it?
- Who owns responsibility organizationally?
- What protocols (Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI, or even NFS) “count”?
- Contrasting the financial benefits with the management complexity.
- A discussion of other protocols (especially iSCSI) over lossless-Ethernet (DCB)
- Comparison of buffer credit mechanisms (as in Fibre Channel) with pause mechanisms (in DCB Ethernet)
- Demands on Ethernet hardware design to support converged traffic (less over-subscription, larger buffers, etc)
- The heavy demands placed by solid state storage on storage networks
- The role of Ethernet fabrics in converged networks
- The challenge of ETS (802.1Qaz) and DCBX for storage vendors
- Considering the difficulty of implementing congestion notification (802.1Qau) in network hardware
