Design And Implementation Of FCoE Network Adapter

In the era of big data, the need for application diversity and the explosive growth of data storage makes data centers to face the challenge of improving performance, reducing energy consumption and enhancing scalability and flexibility. FCoE(Fibre Channel over Ethernet) is a protocol that mapping FC(Fibre Channel) to Lossless Ethernet, while maintaining compatibility with Fibre Channel and Ethernet frames, which can be used to converge the FC network and Ethernet in data centers, reduce network complexity and lower operation and management costs. Comparing to competing technologies such as iSCSI and InfiniBand, FCoE combines the advantages of FC and Ethernet and has become one of the next generation technologies in data center networking area. Researching on the architecture of FCoE transmission interface controller, designing the FCoE network adapter and constructing FCoE storage networking technologies are of great significance to break the technology monopoly of foreign countries and develop network storage products of independent intellectual property rights.Using FPGA(Field-Programmable Gate Array) and AXI(Advanced eXtensible Interface) bus architecture, a high bandwidth and low latency FCoE transmission interface controller is designed and implemented which supports 10 Gigabit Ethernet interface and data transfer by a high performance DMA(Direct Memory Access) through the PCI Express interfaces with the host. FCoE network adapter is designed and implemented based on 10 Gigabit Ethernet physical layer chip AEL2005 which supports FCoE protocol processing and can be used to construct FCoE storage networking.Evaluations indicate that the performance of the FPGA based transmission interface controller can achieve the design goals of 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The FCoE network adapter can communicate with commercial 10 Gigabit network adapters and supports read/write operations via FCoE protocol to access a disk array and is available for FCoE storage network construction.