The “Great Storage Debates” webcast series continues, this time on FCoE vs. iSCSI vs. iSER. Like past “Great Storage Debates,” the goal of this presentation is not to have a winner emerge, but rather provide vendor-neutral education on the capabilities and use cases of these technologies so that attendees can become more informed and make educated decisions.
One of the features of modern data centers is the ubiquitous use of Ethernet. Although many data centers run multiple separate networks (Ethernet and Fibre Channel (FC)), these parallel infrastructures require separate switches, network adapters, management utilities and staff, which may not be cost effective.
Multiple options for Ethernet-based SANs enable network convergence, including FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) which allows FC protocols over Ethernet and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) for transport of SCSI commands over TCP/IP-Ethernet networks. There are also new Ethernet technologies that reduce the amount of CPU overhead in transferring data from server to client by using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), which is leveraged by iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) to avoid unnecessary data copying.
That leads to several questions about FCoE, iSCSI and iSER:
- If we can run various network storage protocols over Ethernet, what differentiates them?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of FCoE, iSCSI and iSER?
- How are they structured?
- What software and hardware do they require?
- How are they implemented, configured and managed?
- Do they perform differently?
- What do you need to do to take advantage of them in the data center?
- What are the best use cases for each?
Join our SNIA experts as they answer all these questions and more on the next Great Storage Debate.
