Fibre Channel over Ethernet standard

From an article at SC Online we get this news of a new standard in the works:

A community of leading IT vendors have 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.

This matters because the volume and penetration are pushing Ethernet faster than other specialized technologies, and it is finally getting to the point that it’s viable for most inside-the-datacenter interconnections (remember HiPPI?). Bonus: maintaining one fabric is cheaper than maintaining several.