Expansion of Ethernet local areas networks for the use in Data Center is called Data Center Bridging
. The Task Group of IEEE 802.1 Work Group carries out the efforts to improve the quality. Ethernet is traditionally a primary network protocol in Data Centers for computer to computer communications. Ethernet is designed in such a way that in order to best effort network, it may deliver packets out of order or drop packets when devices or network are busy. In internet protocols responsibility of the transport protocols is traditionally judged by transport reliability. Best advantage of Ethernet is to add extensions to the existing protocol suite in order to provide reliability without inviting penalties of TCP. There are good chances of higher granularity in bandwidth allocation control. Also to use it more competently. Ethernet is also a good transport for server cluster traffic and storage.
Most widely accepted Data Center Bridging Standards Task Groups are:
Priority-based Flow Control PFC main motive of this mechanism is to make sure under congestion in DCB networks loss is zero. It provides a link level flow control mechanism that can be controlled separately for each Class of Service CoS.
Congestion Notifications congestion management for protocols that are capable of transmission rate to avoid frame loss are Congestion Notification. Many protocols like TCP are benefited because it respond to congestion in more periodic manner.
Data Center Bridging Capabilities Exchange Protocol or DCBX basically a exchange protocol it is used for transmission of configurations between neighbors in order to ensure reliable configuration across the network.
Some of the enhanced versions of Ethernet are as follows:
CEE or Converged Enhanced Ethernet this generic term is used by many vendors like IBM, HP, Dell e.t.c. other vendors also refer it simply as enhanced Ethernet.
DCE or Data Center Ethernet enhanced Ethernet based on the Data Center Bridging on the Data Center Bridging standards. Layer 2 multipathing implementation is also included. It is based on the IETFs Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL0 proposal).