HP A7446B Converged fabrics: Emerging technologies for simplifying data center - Page 6

Figure 4. Standard compared to unified I/O server deployment Data center bridging Data center bridging (DCB), which is another name for DCE or CEE, prioritizes traffic types and bandwidth sharing within an Ethernet link. It provides the following enhancements to the existing Ethernet 802.1 bridge specifications that will be used in converged network deployments where all applications can be run over a single Ethernet link: Congestion Notification (CN), which will provide congestion management to reduce data loss Priority-based Flow Control (PFC), which will provide a link-level flow control mechanism to prevent loss due to congestion Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS), which will provide a common management framework to assign bandwidth to different traffic classes A discovery and capability exchange protocol to ensure consistent configuration across the network In the first phase of migration to converged fabrics, CNAs and a converged fabric bridge will provide connectivity between servers, the LAN/WAN, and the SAN (Figure 5). 6