FCoE is a very simple protocol. The only action needed is encapsulate. It is done today with 10Gbps Ethernet. This requires PCI Express and Lossless Ethernet. It matches the B2B credits used in Fibrechannel to provide a lossless service. All the tools are still applicable.

A lot of customers are comparing the FCoE protocol with the existing ones, such as iSCSI and Infiniband and iSER.

Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) provides a class of service flow control and has the ability to support no drop, drop and late drop traffic. The CoS based BW management allows you to group classes of traffic into "Service Lanes". Congestion Notification is end to end congestion management for L2 network. The Data Center Bridging Exchange provides auto-negotiation for enhanced Ethernet capabilities. L2 multi-path for Unicast and Multicast eliminates spanning tree for L2 topologies.

The combination we are looking for is low latency and data centre Ethernet. The result is a low latency and low latency jitter. Infiniband is still the solution. At Cisco there are already switches that can provide this.