DCS is excited to share the news that it was chosen by the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) to be the connectivity provider for the FCIA’s fourth FC-NVMe multivendor plugfest, held July 23-27 in Milpitas, California.

Focused on Gen 6 Fibre Channel (FC) compatibility and the FC-NVMe standard, the five-day event drew 13 participating companies—a 33 percent increase over last year’s plugfest—including Cisco Systems UCS, Dell EMC and NetApp. Tasked with ensuring that each manufacturer’s 32G FC equipment needs be connected rapidly and reliably, DCS enabled six storage targets and 25 initiators to be connected in a high-availability multihop, multifabric switched SAN.

“It’s an honor that the FCIA chose us to provide the connectivity for its latest plugfest,” says Kevin Ehringer, founder and chief technology officer of DCS. “It’s critical that we get accurate test results from these plugfests in order to demonstrate interoperability in different scenarios, and reliable results depend on reliable connectivity.”

A number of key accomplishments resulted from this plugfest. Among them:

  • Error injection tests to validate correct FC-NVMe and FC recovery and data integrity
  • Successful demonstration of Gen 6 FC active optical cables (FC-AOCs)
  • Multiple vendor initiator, switch and target FC and FC-NVMe conformance and interoperability
  • Testing of commercially available enterprise market storage arrays with FC-NVMe
  • Gen 6 fabric connectivity to a variety of market available NVMe drives
  • Data integration validation over multivendor direct-connect and switched multihop fabric topologies
  • Concurrent FC-NVMe and FC through the same initiator, fabric and target ports

“This was the first plugfest where market-ready, enterprise-class products were represented that could make up a true end-to-end FC-NVMe solution,” said Mark Jones, president and chairman of the board, FCIA, and director, Technical Marketing and Performance, Broadcom Inc. “DCS made a tremendous contribution with its structured connectivity solutions that support the demands of storage area networks.”