J Metz

I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent individual. Well, perhaps “reasonably” is a debatable term; just ask my friends. Or my wife. (Then again, don’t ask my wife.) Reasonable or not, though, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around what all this “software defi…

Last week I had the rare pleasure of being able to attend a storage conference (rare in the sense that I usually am one of the speakers, rather than one of the attendees). It was SNIA’s Storage Developer’s Conference, and like most events there were both things that were interesting and…

In the past articles we’ve talked about doing distance extension for SANs, focusing first on building the physical elements that are required, before moving on to how Fibre Channel can be extended using buffer credits. In this article we’re going to talk about how it is best to think of…

In the previous article we looked at some of the physical characteristics of building a SAN extension. In other words, we looked at the different ways there are to “build the pipe.” We didn’t, however, get the chance to talk about the speed or capacity of the pipes, nor did we talk…

In the last article, we looked at the big picture of what is involved in creating a SAN distance extension. In this article, we’re going to take a slightly closer look at the physical requirements and with luck we’ll be able to clear up some general confusion and misconceptions along the…

A long time ago I got asked to write about how to use Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) for distance. After all, we were getting the same question over and over: What is the distance limitation for FCoE? Now, the short answer for this can be checking out various data sheets for the Nexus 2000, Nexu…

Okay, I have a confession to make. I’ve been somewhat amused by Brocade’s recent “Gen 5” Fibre Channel campaign. After all, the idea that “we’re going to simply call 16G Fibre Channel something other than 16G Fibre Channel and pretend that people will not figure o…

What do you get when you cross iSCSI with lossless Ethernet? A lot of confusion. I do quite a lot of presentations regarding converged networks, including Fibre Channel, whether native or over Ethernet (i.e., FCoE), iSCSI, NAS, etc. The hardest part about these presentations are combating some of th…

It’s been a long time coming, it’s true. It was long the #1 request I have gotten when it comes to Cisco’s deployment for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE): when is UCS going to have “FCoE Northbound?” Now, at long last, I can confirm that the answer is right now. I sa…