Networking Company Cisco (News - Alert) Technology has been consistently making strategic investments to capture new market opportunities, gain access to new technologies and drive innovation. The company confirmed that it has been assigned a patent for "virtual fabric membership assignments for fiber channel over Ethernet network devices."

The patent was developed by Ganesan Rajagopal, Bangalore, India, and Sunil John Varghese, Bangalore, India. Application for the same was filed on June 2, 2010.

Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is an INCITS T11 industry standard that allows Fiber Channel to be carried over Ethernet links. It drastically reduces the number of I/O adapters, cables, and switches in the data center, while providing a wire-once, agile infrastructure. This technology is one of the core components of Cisco Unified Fabric, which serves as a primary building block for cloud-based, virtualized, and general purpose data centers.

The abstract of the new patent for "virtual fabric membership assignments for fiber channel over Ethernet network devices," published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Techniques are provided herein for receiving at a first network device, a virtual local area network discovery frame from a second network device. The second network device is configured to encapsulate Fiber Channel over Ethernet. The hardware media access control address or Port World Wide Name of the second network device is extracted from the VLAN discovery frame. A mapping is identified between the second network device and a corresponding virtual storage area network based on the hardware MAC address or PWWN. The mapping identifies a corresponding VLAN for the second network device to use for login in order to communicate with the corresponding VSAN. Information representing the identified VLAN is sent to the second network device."

In related news, Cisco released version 7.4 of its Cisco Unified Wireless Network (CUWN) software.