Spirent Launching FCoE Test System

Spirent Communications plc, a provider of performance analysis and service management solutions, announced the launch of Spirent TestCenter Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Solution, the industry’s first test product to validate the performance characteristics of FCoE systems, an emerging technology for enterprise data center networks. A demonstration of this FCoE solution is being showcased at the Spirent Proof of Concept (SPoC) Labs and Collaboration Centers in Beijing, London and Sunnyvale.

FCoE is a proposed industry standard designed to extend data connectivity in addressing current and future business requirements. FCoE maintains existing management paradigm and tools for storage and will serve as a bridge between storage networking and other next-generation data center networks. Initially, FCoE offers SAN and systems administrators the benefit of being able to reduce the number of physical network interfaces in the server, which reduces costs and simplifies management. FCoE utilizes the mission-critical characteristics of Fibre Channel technology and works with existing infrastructure and applications.

The Spirent TestCenter FCoE solution helps assess the interaction of storage and data center traffic over a common interface. Built on Spirent’s Fibre Channel hardware and software expertise, the introduction of its FCoE solution demonstrates the company’s market leadership and commitment to advancing the development and deployment of the latest technologies. By leveraging its extensive expertise in the Fibre Channel and Ethernet marketplaces, Spirent delivers the most complete product of its kind with the ability to support Layer 2-7 network performance testing with a broad platform specifically designed for multi-play networks and multi-device technologies.

"Brocade is a pioneer who helped create the SAN industry and customers are now turning to us as a strategic and trusted vendor. Specifically, they are asking us to help them evolve their data centers with new technologies in mind while continuing to enjoy the benefits of the most innovative, high-performance data center fabric technologies available today," said Marty Lans, senior director in the Data Center Infrastructure Division at Brocade. "With the only product capable of pre-testing the performance and interoperability of the FCoE protocol for storage networks, working with Spirent will help ensure that our FCoE solutions will maintain industry-leading latency and loss behaviors and maintain Fibre Channel-like integrity of data connectivity"

"Testing is becoming a strategic imperative for our customers, especially as they consider developing technologies such as FCoE," said Tim Jefferson, general manager for Spirent TestCenter at Spirent Communications. "Spirent is in a unique position to serve this market since we are able extended our knowledge of Fibre Channel and Ethernet testing, and our expertise in the 10-Gigabit arena to develop the most comprehensive solution for testing a superior breed of storage network and data center solutions."

Test engineers now have the ability to analyze a number of critical occurrences including the encapsulation of a native Fibre Channel frame into an Ethernet frame, the emergence of Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) to help ensure lossless fabric, and the effect of replacing a Fibre Channel link with MAC addresses in CEE environments. Spirent TestCenter FCoE provides support for FCoE Initialization Protocol (FIP), a control plane protocol, and Priority Flow Control (PFC), the advanced quality of service protocol for Ethernet. Ultimately, users of Spirent’s FCoE solution can easily understand latency issues as well as the impact of packets which are dropped and scenarios such as loss of power.