Vendors Propose FCOE

SAN DIEGO -- A community of leading IT vendors today announced it has proposed the creation of a new technology specification called Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to the T11 Committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). FCoE would enable SAN traffic to be natively transported over Ethernet networks, while protecting and extending the investment that customers have made in storage networks. The proposal for a new direct mapping of Fibre Channel over Ethernet has the support of industry leading vendors including, Brocade, Cisco, EMC, Emulex Corp., IBM, Intel, Nuova, QLogic, and Sun Microsystems. This proposal is the first of many steps toward the development of this future standard.

FCoE would give customers a new choice for more pervasive server connectivity in the data center, and would complement todays existing connectivity and protocols used in storage and data center networking. User benefits of this future technology would include:

The IT industry has long sought a consolidated I/O architecture that unifies the multiple transport technologies in the data center. By combining multiple types of data traffic, end users could realize substantial benefits in the future, including: reduced management complexity, reduced time to deployment, reduced capital and operating costs, and lower power utilization.

Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD)

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC)

Emulex Corp. (NYSE: ELX)

IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)

Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC)

QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq: QLGC)Sun Microsystems Inc.