Understanding FCoE-FC Gateway Benefits
Configuring a QFX3500 switch or a Node device on a QFabric™ family of products as a Fibre Channel over Ethernet to Fibre Channel (FCoE-FC) gateway enables you to converge your Ethernet network and your FC storage area network (SAN) traffic. The FCoE-FC gateway handles both FC traffic encapsulated in Ethernet (FCoE traffic) and native FC traffic from the FC SAN. The FCoE-FC gateway encapsulates native FC traffic from the FC SAN in Ethernet before forwarding it to the Ethernet network as FCoE traffic. The FCoE-FC gateway also decapsulates FCoE traffic from the Ethernet network before forwarding it to the FC SAN as native FC traffic.
The ability to converge Ethernet traffic (as FCoE traffic) and native FC traffic is cost-effective because it eliminates the need to encapsulate native FC traffic and decapsulate FCoE traffic on the FC SAN edge switch. Thus, the FC SAN switch does not need extra adapters to handle FCoE traffic. Instead, the FC SAN edge switch only needs to handle native FC traffic.
Using a QFX3500 Switch as an FCoE-FC gateway involves configuring native FC interfaces on ports connected to the FC SAN, and configuring an FCoE VLAN interface that includes Ethernet ports connected to the FCoE (Ethernet) network. You configure the native FC interfaces and the FCoE VLAN interface as part of a local FC fabric on the FCoE-FC gateway. In addition to creating an FCoE-FC gateway fabric, you must also configure proper class-of-service treatment to ensure lossless transport of the storage traffic across the Ethernet network.
