FCoE is one of several efforts aiming to consolidate server, storage and networking jobs on to a single network for tomorrow's data centers in order to save cost and power.

With the exception of a few companies such as Cisco, most vendors have not yet completed work on new ASICs and software for the technology. Due to the still evolving nature of the underlying standards, even Cisco's new Nexus 5000 switch may need a software upgrade to be compliant with work on FCoE in separate T11 and IEEE groups.

"These initial products are really aiming to seed the market and get people to evaluate the technology," said Bob Wheeler, senior analyst with The Linley Group (Mountain View, Calif.).

Wheeler noted that the new Emulex LightPulse LP21000 server card for FCoE uses four chips—separate Ethernet and Fibre Channel controllers along with a PCI Express switch and an address translation chip. Emulex would not state the power consumption of the card except to say it comes in under the 25W limit for an Express slot. The company plans a more integrated offering in 2009.

"It's not the most cost or power efficient product and looks more like a proof-of-technology than a high-volume product," Wheeler said.

"The first half of 2009 is our target as an industry to get there with a competitive solution," said Renato Recio, a chief engineer for server networking at IBM. "If I get there with two or three times the parts it's not worth it," said Recio, underlining the need for ASICs.

A top technologist at Fibre Channel switch maker Brocade Communications agreed.

"Participating vendors are releasing pre-standard products in 2008 for evaluation and test purposes which will drive development of the integrated silicon in 2009," said John Hufferd, senior executive director of technology at Brocade. "Work done in 2009 will validate the use cases and contribute to actionable, deployable solutions for the data center in 2010 and going forward," he added.

Cisco appears to be one of the few companies delivering an ASIC-based product at this point. The Nexus 5000 uses as many as five ASICs including multiple instances of two key chips, said Dante Malagrino, director of product marketing for data center solutions at Cisco.

"You need hardware to handle these transactions at line speeds," said Malagrino.

One main ASIC in the Cisco system is a port controller that acts as an Ethernet controller, handling packet buffering and virtual queuing for lossless traffic. The other is a non-blocking crossbar switch with an aggregate bandwidth of more than a Terabit/second and an integrated traffic scheduler.

The system also uses a supervisory unit based on an Intel CPU running a new operating system co-developed by Cisco and Nuova Systems, the 200-person startup that developed the product and was acquired by Cisco this week. That OS is a hybrid based on the storage OS used in Cisco's first Fibre Channel switch and Cisco's classic IOS networking software.

"All of the physical-layer definitions to make hardware compliant have been done in the standards groups," said Malagrino. "Most likely we will be able to claim [standards] compliance out the gate [when the product ships in May], or in the worst case we will need a software upgrade," he added.

The T11 spec for FCoE will probably be complete by August, said Recio. However, the IEEE work which is defining a lossless version of Ethernet to be a more robust foundation for FCoE still has significant work ahead.

"We saw that not enough progress was being made and we were stuck in a rut, so I called all these people in December and we formed a new group called CEE Authors," said Recio.

That group, adopting the name of Converged Enhanced Ethernet many have used for the lossless standard, is trying to finish before the end of May proposals in three specific areas that will then be submitted to the IEEE group. Some vendors hope to implement products based on the proposals as a "version 0" that they would upgrade later to whatever final standard the IEEE group sets.

"We think it's a good thing, and we are telling our customers a Version 0 product is fine," said Recio.

The CEE Authors group is chaired by Recio and includes members from Broadcom, Brocade, Cisco, Emulex, Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, Juniper, QLogic and Sun.