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Leading IT Vendors Propose Fibre Channel over Ethernet Standard

Industry Leaders Take First Steps to Further Extend Today's SAN and Enable Consolidated Server IO in the Data Center

SAN DIEGO, Calif., April 5, 2007 - A community of leading IT vendors today announced it has proposed the creation of a new technology specification called Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to the T11 Committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). FCoE would enable SAN traffic to be natively transported over Ethernet networks, while protecting and extending the investment that customers have made in storage networks. The proposal for a new direct mapping of Fibre Channel over Ethernet has the support of industry leading vendors including, Brocade, Cisco, EMC, Emulex Corp., IBM, Intel, Nuova, QLogic, and Sun Microsystems. This proposal is the first of many steps toward the development of this future standard.

FCoE would give customers a new choice for more pervasive server connectivity in the data center, and would complement today's existing connectivity and protocols used in storage and data center networking. User benefits of this future technology would include:

• Seamless extension and protection of existing investments
• Lower long-term operating costs via consolidated connectivity and management
• A management model consistent with that used in Fibre Channel SANs
• A unified data center fabric that meets the reliability, latency, and performance requirements for storage and broader data center connectivity.
• Additional server connectivity options for more cost-effective data center networking
• Reduction in multiple server I/O and parallel network infrastructure commonly used in data centers

The IT industry has long sought a consolidated I/O architecture that unifies the multiple transport technologies in the data center. By combining multiple types of data traffic, end users could realize substantial benefits in the future, including: reduced management complexity, reduced time to deployment, reduced capital and operating costs, and lower power utilization.

For more information, visit the ANSI T11 website at www.t11.org.

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