Recovering a little from some excitement of last week I wanted to complete a blog post I’d started. I continue to try and see what the rest of the world has to say about convergence and the market excitement around it.
Since my first post introducing my thoughts on where we stood with FCoE and it’s now been three months and there has been some ratification activity and there has been a few more independent bloggers out there that have begun to tear into the world of FCoE.
I’ve seen some good information on no multi-hop FCoE capabilities (yet) limiting FCoE to the edge of your SAN network. This of course will change with time but it’s an important limitation to notice for those of you hearing of how FCoE is out to solve world hunger now that it’s ‘ratified’.
We also have Howard Marks talking about how FCoE Ain’t There Yet as well. He points out the Gartner term “Peak of Inflated Expectations” which I jokingly refer to ‘solving world hunger’ when I talk about FCoE. He drags out some of the past ‘solve world hunger’ products such as ATM. For those of you who didn’t play along at home when ATM was coming out it was going to replace everything from Token Ring and Ethernet in your LAN, get rid of frame relay WANs, and eliminate the PSTN phone network. Since we have those technologies still you can see how well that worked out.
Another thing to keep in mind is from an OS perspective FCoE adapters are extremely new, and might be difficult to get working compared to what you are used too. I’d also expect a lot of updates to the driver & firmware depending on how the adapter is designed.
My personal belief on where this is going to go is probably a bit different than the rest of the world. I really think that the 10Gb ethernet side of the equation is the big push.
WIth HP’s Flex 10 technology introducing the concept of carving up a 10Gb pipe I think it’s a great start but at the same time it’s a bit monolithic in that it only talks about using an Ethernet pipe as a bunch of small pipes. What really interests me is the idea of taking a 10Gb link and multi-protocl stacking it with FCoE, or iSCSI, as well as standard TCP/IP data traffic. Until adapters can do that easily and the switches they work with handle this seamlessly as well I don’t think one new protocol is going to make a huge impact in the larger data centers.
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