Finisar Delivers Industry’s First 10GbE Protocol Analyzer for FCoE

The implementation of FCoE provides guarantee of packet delivery using the PAUSE command and overcomes the deficiencies of standard Ethernet products which drop frames in overloaded conditions. The FCoE initiative promises to enable cost-savings via consolidated connectivity and management within the server clusters. As a long-standing member of the ANSI T11 committee, Finisar has supported members’ proposals for the initiative on the Xgig platform. The latest release of Xgig supports the recently ratified frame format.

“Finisar has been instrumental in accelerating the adoption of new technologies by providing tools crucial for product development”, said Skip Jones, Chairman of FCIA. “We are very excited that the Xgig tester platform has been enhanced to support the FCoE initiative so quickly. This new analyzer will speed time-to-market of high performance and reliable FCoE products, and push forward the acceptance of this new standard as it is deployed across data centers.”

This FCoE solution consists of a blade that plugs into Finisar’s Xgig platform which expands the Xgig analyzer capability beyond the current 8Gb/s Fibre Channel and 6Gb/s SAS/SATA. This makes the Xgig platform the most comprehensive and integrated protocol analyzer on the market today. With this product release, Finisar demonstrates its continuing commitment to providing end-to-end solutions that enable developers require to capitalize upon the growing 10Gb LAN and SAN markets.

“Many of our customers believe that Fibre Channel over Ethernet will be a promising new standard to provide a critical linkage between the SAN and LAN worlds,” said Paul Hansen, vice president of marketing, Network Tools, Finisar. “This is an exciting new initiative for our industry and Finisar is well-positioned to take a leadership role in helping to accelerate FCoE developments. As a market leader with extensive expertise in both the FC and 10GbE technologies, our latest analyzer will be a crucial tool for any company developing solutions to this new standard.”

In addition to being the first to support FCoE, the 10GbE Analyzer also offers an extensive range of capabilities through the Xgig platform that accelerate both product development and network troubleshooting. These capabilities include scalability with the capacity for monitoring up to 32 ports, and 100% capture enabling developers to collect and analyze all traffic passing over a link. Combined with Finisar’s Traffic Analysis Point (TAP) technology, traffic capture and monitoring is completely non-intrusive, simplifying tool set up and guaranteeing accuracy. The analyzer also supports multi-protocol synchronous capture, allowing developers to correlate packets as they cross protocol domains.

“The Xgig 10GbE Protocol Analyzer will play a critical role in ensuring our market leadership in the FCoE market,” said Soni Jiandani, CMO at Nuova Systems. “By enabling us to see what’s really happening in the network, we will be able to guarantee the high performance, scalability, and reliability of our equipment to create a robust, consolidated I/O fabric.”