Second Industry-Wide, Multi-Vendor Plugfest Focused on NVMe Over Fibre Channel Fabric Completed by Fibre Channel Industry Association 

MINNEAPOLIS, Dec. 13, 2017 -- The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) today announced the completion of its second industry-wide multi-vendor plugfest focused on Non-Volatile Memory Express  (NVMe) over Fibre Channel (FC) Fabric and the first validation of the newly completed INCITS T11 FC-NVMe standard.

FCIA’s FC-NVMe plugfest was held during the NVM Express organization’s management interface (NVMe-MI) plugfest, the week of October 30, 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 38 plugfests with FCIA over 18 years to test the continued development of FC technologies.

“The completion of this second FC-NVMe plugfest comes at a critical junction,” said FC-NVMe plugfest participant Mark Jones, president and chairman of the board, FCIA, and director, Technical Marketing and Performance, Broadcom Limited. “Major operating system vendors are just releasing support for NVMe over Fabrics and the FC-NVMe INCITS T11 standard is now complete and has been forwarded to INCITS. The FC-NVMe technology is on track to becoming as interoperable and reliable as previous generations of FC, while vastly improving performance for the next generation all-flash datacenters.”

With nine 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.

Key accomplishments from this second FCIA-sponsored plugfest of FC-NVMe include:

• Multiple vendor FC-NVMe initiator, switch, and target conformance and interoperability
• Gen 6 16 and 32GFC fabric connectivity to a variety of market available NVMe drives
• Data integrity validation over multi-vendor direct-connect and switched multi-hop fabric topologies
• Error injection tests to validate correct FC-NVMe and FC recovery and data integrity
• Concurrent NVMe and legacy SCSI traffic through the same FC fabric ports
• FC-NVMe and FC over 32GFC long wave 10km single mode fiber inter-switch trunked ports
• FC-NVMe packet inspection conformance analysis using advanced trace capture and analysis tools
• Cross fabric inline trace based relative performance comparisons of FCP-SCSI and FC-NVMe
• Multi-vendor high availability multi-speed concurrent FC-NVMe and FC fabric conformance and interoperability
• Trials of the UNH-IOL’s NVMe over Fabrics conformance test suite of products for inclusion on the NVMe Integrator's List

“It is an honor to lead and participate in plugfests with outstanding engineers from across the FC industry who share a single purpose of driving FC-NVMe technology to be interoperable at the highest level of dependability expected by the FC community,” said Barry Maskas, plugfest chair and Technical Staff consultant at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “In comparison to the first FC-NVMe focused plugfest, results from this second event showed continued maturation demonstrated through tested use case configurations. Plugfest participants refined the validation, certification, and performance characterization foundation which has proven successful by previous FC technology innovations for the benefit of our collective customers.”The nine companies participating in FCIA’s FV-NVMe plugfest were:

"The UNH-IOL has worked with the FCIA and its member companies for over 20 years on Fibre Channel's latest technological enhancements,” said Timothy Sheehan, manager, Datacenter Technologies, UNH-IOL. “The IOL is focused on supporting the for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) Fabrics conformance and interoperability testing and has brought this experience to the FCIA member companies. The last two FCIA plugfest events have focused on FC-NVMe testing and have shown great progress.”

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 provide 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.

Source: FCIA