Hi Subhojit,
FCoE means Fiber Channel over Ethernet. Speed is 10 Gb/Second using same 10Gb cable. FCoE will be used for both fiber channel connectivity (for Storage box - block level) and for ethernet lan for file-level access using the same interface & cable. 6Gb/Sec for FiberChannel and 4Gb/Sec for Ethernet LAN in same cable.
Advantage :- 1. It will reduce number of cables. In traditional datacenter, FC cable for storage box & SAN Switch and Cat5 ethernet cable for normal switch.
Iscsi means scsi over IP. Assume in your datacenter, you bought storage box but you are not having SAN switch then in this case, you can connect LAN cable in Storage Box ISCSI (1Gb and 10Gb) port to LAN switch, configure hardware ISCSI initiator (some adapter will support H/W ISCSI adapter - it will offload the ISCSI functionallity from CPU to ISCSI adapter) OR Softwarte ISCSI initiator (If it is not supporting offloading, we can create S/W ISCSI initiator in Windows & VMware).
Advantage :- With the existing LAN connectivity you can connect Storage Box without investing & configuring SAN Switch, Fiber Channel Cable and FCoE cables.
Nexus series switches supporting FCoE. You need to enable the FCoE in switch and make port as Virtual FC (VFC) then you can use FCoE.
From,
Sabarna Deb
