The term data center bridging may not be too familiar. Yet, it is actually a common term among the IT specialist. It refers to suite of institute of IEEE standards that stands for Institute of Electrical and the Electronic Engineers. These are the standards used to enable the so called converged fabrics in every data center. In this facility, all the storages, management traffic, cluster IPC and data networking share the same infrastructure of Ethernet network. This data center bridging provides the necessary bandwidth allocation that is based on hardware to specific traffic type. In the meantime, it also enhances the reliability of Ethernet transport by using the priority based flow control. Shortly said, it is an important part of data center virtualization that has to be existed and maintained.
Perhaps, there would be question regarding the use of allocation based on hardware. Well, this allocation is chosen upon the reason that it is the right choice when there is any traffic that bypasses operating system while it is offloaded to the so called converged network adapter. Upon lossless underlying transport of the upper layer protocol the priority based flow control is necessary.
Main Functionality of Data Center Bridging
In general, the DCB offers multiple main functionalities. These functionalities are essential to ensure the data center performance and process can go smoothly. Below is the list of the main and most essential functionalities.
Well, among the available DCB, the Windows-based DCB is often used. It is relatively easy to use and manage including in heterogeneous network. Just like other DCB, it alleviates various issues that occur when the OEMs provide the converged fabric solutions.