Add Blade to the FCoE lineup

February 4, 2010 – When discussions about Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) turn to specific vendors and products, they typically include Broadcom, Brocade, Cisco, Emulex, Intel, QLogic and their various OEMs and resellers, and maybe smaller vendors such as Chelsio and Neterion. And most of InfoStor’s FCoE coverage has focused on those vendors. (See my previous blog post, “FCoE CNAs: The battle lines are being drawn.” )

We’ve been remiss. Blade Network Technologies also supports FCoE in its Ethernet switches.

I discovered that only recently, and since I didn’t know much about the company I attended their Webcast today, which focused on the company’s success and the introduction of its Unified FabricArchitecture (UFA).

Blade claims to have installed more than 7.5 million ports (300,000+ switches), is #3 in the 10GbE switch market (behind Cisco and HP), and has more than a 50% share in the blade switch market (making it #1 in that space).

In addition to FCoE, Blade’s 10GbE switches fully support Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), the “lossless” version of Ethernet.

On the storage front, Blade partners with vendors such as Infortrend, which integrates Blade’s RackSwitch G8124 10GbE switch with its EonStor G6 disk arrays.

On the FCoE/10GbE front, Blade partners with both Emulex and QLogic. For example, Blade’s BNT Virtual Fabric 10G Switch can be combined with Emulex’s 10GbE/FCoE/iSCSI Virtual Fabric Adapter (CFFh) for IBM’s BladeCenter to provide an end-to-end converged networking solution for the BladeCenter H chassis. Blade also provides a component of a single-chassis FCoE solution for IBM's BladeCenter H equipped with Blade’s BNT Virtual Fabric 10G Switch and QLogic’s Virtual Fabric Extension Module and Converged Network Adapters (CNAs).

Support for FCoE for Blade's top-of-rack switches is due this quarter.

For more information on FCoE, see the following articles from infostor.com:

Guidelines for FCoE deployment

The shift to FCoE is underway

The great convergence: FCoE and Enhanced Ethernet

FCIA makes the case for FCoE