SAN FRANCISCO, June 9, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), a non-profit international organization of manufacturers, systems integrators and vendors, today announced the completion of its fourth FCoE Plugfest, which was held during the week of May 24th at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL).
Sponsored by the FCIA, the Plugfest provided a forum where leading Fibre Channel vendors came together to collaborate on their respective FCoE products to ensure interoperability for the T11-FC-BB5 FCoE Standard which was approved by INCITS and forwarded for ANSI standard processing in August 2009.
Participating companies in the Plugfest included ATTO Technology, BLADE Network Technologies, Broadcom, Brocade, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Emulex, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Ixia, JDSU, Mellanox, NetApp, PMC-Sierra, QLogic and Spirent Communications. These companies collaborated in building complex configurations that included FCoE initiators, Data Center Bridging (DCB) switches, FCoE switches, FCoE targets, and Fibre Channel targets that will be common in data centers. The overall testing showed that complex configurations including components from a variety of vendors worked seamlessly.
"In addition to more complex configurations including blades, this Plugfest allowed numerous new vendors to attain interoperability with more DCB switch providers than in previous Plugfests," said Bill Martin, FCoE Plugfest chair and engineer consultant for the Office of Technology at Emulex. "FCoE products that are interoperable and compatible will ensure that Fibre Channel investments are protected with existing storage systems."
"The unanimous support of FCoE is evident as the standard continues to prove its robust design," said Skip Jones, chairman FCIA. "This Plugfest further proved the business case for FCoE as it made use of the network more efficiently and provided universal connectivity by leveraging existing SAN infrastructures."
About FCIA
The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) is a non-profit international organization whose sole purpose is to act as the independent technology and marketing voice of the Fibre Channel industry. We are committed to helping member organizations promote and position Fibre Channel, and to providing a focal point for Fibre Channel information, standards advocacy, and education.
FCIA members include manufacturers, system integrators, developers, vendors, industry professionals, and end users. Our member-led working groups and committees focus on creating and championing the Fibre Channel technology roadmaps, targeting applications that include data storage, video, networking, and storage area network (SAN) management. For more info, go to http://www.fibrechannel.org
About the UNH-IOL
Established in 1988, the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) is a non-profit organization that offers comprehensive interoperability and conformance-based testing through 19 technology-based groups, called consortiums. Test solutions created at the UNH-IOL offer a set of methods to increase interoperability through protocol operations, signaling, and point-to-point and multi-system scenarios. For more information, visit the UNH-IOL website at: www.iol.unh.edu.
The UNH-IOL also runs the Fibre Channel Consortium, a separate association of companies building new products and interested in testing them on an ongoing basis
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