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Cisco Data Center Ethernet and Unified Fabric

The typical data center environment supports two to three parallel networks: one for data, one for storage, and possibly one for server clustering. In addition, servers often have dedicated interfaces for management, backup, or virtual machine live migration. Supporting these interfaces imposes significant costs related to interfaces, cabling, rack space, upstream switches, and power and cooling.

Unified fabric consolidates these different types of traffic onto a single, general-purpose, high-performance, highly available network that greatly simplifies the network infrastructure and reduces costs. To do all this, a unified fabric must be intelligent enough to identify the different types of traffic and handle them appropriately.

In addition to reducing total cost of ownership, unified fabric supports broader data center virtualization by providing consistent, ubiquitous network and storage services to all connected devices.

Data Center Ethernet is a collection of standards-based extensions to classical Ethernet that allows data center architects to create a data center transport layer that is:

  •  Lossless
  • Stable
  • Efficient

Fibre Channel over Ethernet, support the convergence of LANs and storage area networks (SANs) onto a single unified fabric and enhances the operation of iSCSI, network-attached storage (NAS) and other business-critical traffic.


Data Center Ethernet includes the following capabilities:

  • Class-based flow control (CBFC)
  • Enhanced transmission selection (ETS; IEEE 802.1Qaz )
  • Data center bridging capability exchange protocol (DCBCXP)
  • Lossless Ethernet
  • Congestion notification (IEEE 802.1Qau)

Data Center Ethernet is a flexible framework that defines the requirements for switches and end points, which enables devices to support only a subset of the capabilities listed above to be part of a Data Center Ethernet fabric.

Cisco has pioneered and is leading the development of key Data Center Ethernet concepts and facilities within the IEEE and ANSI T.11 standards bodies to develop and promote multivendor, interoperable Data Center Ethernet solutions.

Download White Paper - Cisco Data Center Ethernet White Paper (pdf)