It stands for Fibre Channel Over Ethernet.

I think that most folks are aware, Fibre Channel is the dominate protocol in the Storage Area Network (SAN) environments.  But it has come under pressure lately from the likes of iSCSI, especially because of the migration of using a more cost effective storage protocol (SCSI) in a TCP/IP network.  Now, imagine that seven major vendors get behind the integration of the dominant Layer 2 LAN protocol, Ethernet, with the dominant Layer 2 storage protocol, Fibre Channel... and BAM! (sorry Emeril), you have FCoE.

Cisco and IBM are two principal forces for this, but other backers are Emulex, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Brocade, QLogic, EMC and a Cisco-funded start-up, Nuova Systems. The goal is to directly map the Fibre Channel Protocol to Ethernet.  It is being suggested that the proposed specification would be implemented using 10Gbps Ethernet. Specialized host bus adapters (think LAN Adapter) would look to the server as Fibre Channel and Ethernet to the network.  The advantage over iSCSI would be the elimination of the TCP/IP overhead and having FCoE run as a native Layer 2 service.

This would all enable users to leverage their existing Fibre Channel investments that have been made in the data center back end across what is becoming a more ubiquitous Ethernet backbone.

A first draft of the standard from the the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) could appear in six months, with an approved version in 18 months, and implementation in 2009.  In the meantime, the T10 committee shows the following documents already on file:

07-212V0, from March 30 2007, FCoE: Enabling Fibre Channel over Lossless Ethernet Fabrics by Pelissier and Vobbilisetty

and 07-105V0, March 28 2007, FCoE: An Additional Mapping for FC-BB-5 by Claudio DeSanti (vice-chairman of the T11 Committee and technical lead of Cisco's Data Center Business Unit)

In the meantime, there appears to be a lot of news and interest on the subject. 

Look for new appliances that will be integrating multiprotocol swich architectures with both Ethernet and Fibre Channel ports, and compete with iSCSI offerings.  I'm thinking that a native Switched Ethernet handoff across an MPLS architecture might make for a nice solution.

Looks like 2007 is shaping up to be a good year for storage.