Today the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) today announced the completion of the first Gen 6 32GFC plugfest solely focused on FC-NVMe. Validation of the proposed FC-NVMe standard’s conformance and device interoperability ensures FC’s status as the industry’s most reliable and robust storage networking protocol.
The successful conclusion of this event provides assurance to the FC SAN community that the draft version of the FC-NVMe standard specification combined with the NVMe fabric specifications meets the demanding performance and availability requirements of flash and NVMe storage,” said Mark Jones, president and chairman of the board, FCIA, and director, Technical Marketing and Performance, Broadcom Limited and FC-NVMe plugfest participant. “This event was also notable as providing the first multi-vendor interoperability demonstrating sustained low latency of Gen 6 32GFC port and fabric concurrency of FC-NVMe and FC, highlighting the adaptive architecture of FC that has more than 50 million installed ports in operation in the world’s leading datacenters.”
FCIA’s FC-NVMe plugfest was held during the NVM Express organization’s management interface (NVMe-MI) plugfest, the week of May 21st, 2017 at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL). An independent provider of broad-based testing and standards conformance services for the networking industry, UNH-IOL has conducted more than 37 plugfests with FCIA over 18 years to test the continued development of FC technologies.
With 10 companies participating, the FCIA’s FC-NVMe plugfest featured conformance, error injection, multi-hop, and interoperability testing of FC-NVMe concurrently with Gen 6 32GFC and previous FC generation fabric switches and directors, utilizing datacenter-proven test tools and test methods.
FCIA sponsored plugfests held at UNH-IOL, which is a neutral site, enables participants to collaborate openly while validating conformance and interoperability of FC products”, said Barry Maskas, plugfest chair and Technical Staff consultant at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “With continued innovation, such as FC-NVMe, and use case configurations tested at this plugfest, participants laid a validation and certification foundation built on the methodology for conformance, interoperability, and compatibility that has proven successful by the FC industry companies. This and future FCIA sponsored plugfests, will enable FC SAN and FC-NVMe technology adopters to grow their storage infrastructure, taking advantage of speed, low latency, and functional improvements, while leveraging current investments.”
