Fabric wars: Cisco vs.Brocade vs. Juniper

摘要

The past three years have been very noisy on the data center fabric and architecture front. Every quarter seems to bring about a new convergence blueprint from another vendor — and a variety from one or two. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is being pushed hard by Cisco. It consolidates server adapter ports by tunneling FCoE instead of requiring a separate Fibre Channel network. FCoE with Cisco's FabricPath lossless Ethernet software on the company's Nexus switches forms the network backbone. But Cisco is also looking to unify compute and storage with the network through its Unified Computing System (UCS), which includes Cisco blade servers with memory extensions to accommodate a high number of virtual machines and their service profiles.