Nice updated EMC Unified iSCSI/FCoE tidbits…

I did a post as EMC Native FCoE support was announced, and there’s a bit more technical stuff to add today.  Read the original post back here, with a neato video of me in the lab installing it.

FLARE 30.5 (just released) is the level of code that is needed on the CX4 and EMC Unified to support FCoE without any RPQ or special handling.

Note – FLARE 30.5 also includes some important fixes:

• Under some rare conditions, people saw memory leaks when using FAST Cache.  FIXED.
• Under some rare condtions, people saw issues when upgrading from FLARE 29 and storage pools with thin LUNs were used.  FIXED.
• there were some issues with the Broadcom NIC used in the 10GbE iSCSI Ultraflex IO module involving TCP selective ACK behavior – with a symptom of slow 10GbE with smaller block random write workloads.  This was discussed at VMworld in TA8133 here.   This issue is resolved by FLARE 30.5, but also available for FLARE 29 customers as a patch.  FIXED.

Ok back to FCoE…

The FCoE mods are available for order.  They are different from the 10Gb iSCSI Ultraflex IO modules

• Each has 2 10GbE interfaces
• They can go to a top of rack switch (right now the supported switches are Cisco Nexus 2000 and 5000 and the Brocade DS8000) and cannot be directly connected to a CNA in a host.
• There will be optical and TwinAx (active – not passive – note that Cisco twinax is generally passive) connectivity options
• 1 pair of I/O Mods (total of 2 w/ 4 10GbE ports) will be supported in the 120 and 240 platforms.
• 2 pairs of I/O Mods (total of 4 w/ 8 10GbE ports) will be supported in the 480 and 960 platforms
• They must be inserted into empty slots only

The inevitable march of 10GbE continues… Great to see!

Comments

[JeffS]

What's the list (MSRP) on the FCoE cards, the part number, and is the part number for a pair?

[Craig]

Please correct me if I am wrong, your nexus 2000 is only support gigabits interface with 10G uplink to 5k or 7k directly. Getting confuse while reading this how can your FCoE CNA connections can connect into Nexus 2000?

[JW]

Craig,

The Nexus 2000 (2200 series)can also support 10G host links.