I have been extremely busy of late making sure the last few weeks of integration testing are complete and any bugs we can find are stamped out, and I’ve been unable to keep up at least a weekly cadence this month, so I thought I would blast out some commentary on a number of things that have happened here in one big consolidated post.

It appears that the appropriate sacrifices were made to the gods of computer shows and our demonstration of the eVFA adapter on the IBM BladeCenter at Storage Networking World: Europe.

Unfortunately, due to my need to be in the States to help finish up our final testing before general availability, I was unable to attend in person. Instead, I helped walk the team over the phone through enabling the adapter & getting VMware up and running.

I’ve been following vicariously through people that have gotten updates and posted their thoughts. One author, Nigel Poulton, was lucky enough to gain some nice pictures of the HS22 with the eVFA card installed in his write-up, and he touches on something I wanted to expand on a little bit in this quote:

NOTE: Of particular interest to me was the fact that the core features, as well as the base cost, of this adapter are 10Gbps Ethernet. This is very interesting when you consider Emulex are traditionally a Fibre Channel company. Clearly Emulex are moving with the market here and recognising Ethernet as the dominant technology and building on that. Emulex also have people on IEEE 802.1 committees such as DCB. Now that’s what I call not betting against Ethernet.

I love it when a plan comes together and people ‘get’ it. This has been something I’ve been trying to communicate to the technical community within IBM since I’ve come on board.

As with most new product announcements, some details take time to permeate in the industry before they are fully understood. There will be questions, and change can take quite some time (See: It is not an Inflection Point…it is an Inflection Process).

I was around and working in datacenters when Fibre Channel hit the world back in the late 90s. While we don’t have the problem now of ‘it’s expensive’ we do have the concerns of how will I manage? Will it do everything I need? and lots of other questions that aren’t completely answered yet. I’ve traded comments on Twitter with Cisco’s Brad Hedlund about how I think Multi-Hop CEE/DCE is that last step and how multiple FCFs (Fibre Channel Forwarders) are my two ‘must have’ features. What I mean by that is if you look at this white paper from Cisco you will notice that they have two separate and redundant networks. The reason for that is right now you can only have one device in your FCoE network that forwards traffic to FCoE. Now, granted, it’ll take a large network to require more than one FCF today but if you look at some SAN infrastructures that are out there they would necessitate multiple isolated networks to completely rip & replace their FC infrastructure.

I’ve also had a bit of time to bounce some comments to Dell’s Jeff Sullivan over a blog post that came out comparing FCoE to iSCSI. After some clarification from the authors, I see where they are headed, but I do think the idea is fundamentally flawed in that FC in some way had to be forced into the OSI model and that because of that there might be some concerns. I do agree iSCSI is more mature than FCoE and probably why they are seeing success with it. But you also have a complete end to end solution maturity here. FCoE while has had some successes with announcements around products in the adapter, switch, and storage parts of the market it’s not nearly as ubiquitous as FC and iSCSI are. Slight plug here, but my OneConnect OCe10102-I card is the only adapter that is hardware offload is the only uCNA that does that, and extremely well I might add.

That post is a must read too, it has some great points though about the state of the FCoE space. The ‘all’ part isn’t there 100%. Which is why a move to 10Gb now for data traffic, and migrate to FCoE for storage traffic is actually resonating so well with a lot of our customers. I’m aware of large opportunities that are buying both an FC card and the eVFA card already in the pipeline. So while going entirely to FCoE does work for some, there are a lot of more conservative companies that will put the stuff in place for a migration, but aren’t ready for it today.

So those are my thoughts for the month of October. Now that things are wrapping up and the eVFA card is becoming readily available in a short amount of time. I’m will continue my planned discussion about the eVFA in future posts.