What Does Converged Enhanced Ethernet Mean?
Converged enhanced Ethernet (CEE) is an enhanced single interconnect Ethernet technology developed to converge a variety of applications in data centers. CEE’s primary focus is to consolidate the number of cables and adapters connected to servers.
Today’s enterprise storage data centers demand lossless traffic service. These storage performance requirements can be met through the use of the IEEE 802 standard. Converged enhanced Ethernet is a term used to refer to the IEEE 802.1 standard version, and is considered to be the next generation Ethernet, providing a standardized packet lossless technology in input/output consolidation fiber channel over Ethernet networks. The main purpose behind using CEE networks, as a transport mechanism for fiber channels is to make the stacking of host protocol simple and to consolidate network interfaces in a data center environment.
CEE is also known as data center bridging
Techopedia Explains Converged Enhanced Ethernet
Some of the CEE enhancements to Ethernet include:
- Priority Flow Control: Focused on developing a standard mechanism that can control the flow for each traffic class of service independently. The idea is to ensure zero loss when a traffic class gets congested in data center bridging networks.
- Data Center Bridging exchange: Focused on developing a standard mechanism that can ensure interoperability.
- Priority-Based Packet Scheduling: Used to develop a standard mechanism to set scheduling priorities for a set of traffic classes.
Some of the advantages of CEE convergence include:
- CEE enhances the network-attached storage and Internet small computer interface by offering traffic differentiation at the link layer.
- Fiber channel over CEE enables new servers in the data center to use a single link for both Ethernet and fiber channel communications, thereby reducing cable costs.
- CEE technology can be used to converge a variety of applications such as local area networks, storage area networks and high-performance computing.
