Users Guide

recover from frame loss. To successfully transport storage trac, data center Ethernet must provide no-
drop service with lossless links.
InterProcess
Communication
(IPC) trac
InterProcess Communication (IPC) trac within high-performance computing clusters to share information.
Server trac is extremely sensitive to latency requirements.
To ensure lossless delivery and latency-sensitive scheduling of storage and service trac and I/O convergence of LAN, storage, and
server trac over a unied fabric, IEEE data center bridging adds the following extensions to a classical Ethernet network:
802.1Qbb — Priority-based Flow Control (PFC)
802.1Qaz — Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS)
802.1Qau — Congestion Notication
Data Center Bridging Exchange (DCBx) protocol
NOTE: Dell Networking OS supports only the PFC, ETS, and DCBx features in data center bridging.
Priority-Based Flow Control
In a data center network, priority-based ow control (PFC) manages large bursts of one trac type in multiprotocol links so that it
does not aect other trac types and no frames are lost due to congestion.
When PFC detects congestion on a queue for a specied priority, it sends a pause frame for the 802.1p priority trac to the
transmitting device. In this way, PFC ensures that PFC-enabled priority trac is not dropped by the switch.
PFC enhances the existing 802.3x pause and 802.1p priority capabilities to enable ow control based on 802.1p priorities (classes of
service). Instead of stopping all trac on a link (as performed by the traditional Ethernet pause mechanism), PFC pauses trac on a
link according to the 802.1p priority set on a trac type. You can create lossless ows for storage and server trac while allowing for
loss in case of LAN trac congestion on the same physical interface.
The following illustration shows how PFC handles trac congestion by pausing the transmission of incoming trac with dot1p
priority 4.
The system supports loading two DCB_Cong les:
FCoE converged trac with priority 3.
iSCSI storage trac with priority 4.
In the Dell Networking OS, PFC is implemented as follows:
PFC supports buering to receive data that continues to arrive on an interface while the remote system reacts to the PFC
operation.
PFC uses DCB MIB IEEE 802.1azd2.5 and PFC MIB IEEE 802.1bb-d2.2.
Data Center Bridging (DCB)
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