Part 2: Converged Networking and Storage

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

Join Chip Copper of Brocade and the following Tech Field Day delegates as they discuss this question.