The Network Hub » FCoE

FCoE hype, continued

Shamus McGillicuddy — Thu, 19 May 2011 19:54:38 +0000

I’ve gotten a lot of reader feedback from my story on data center fabric and FCoE hype, which was based on a vendor panel on data center architecture at Interop 2011. Most of the vendors on the panel conceded that Fibre Channel over Ethernet is either a little or a lot over-hyped. One vendor asked for a show of hands from the hundreds of engineers in the room for exactly how many were actually pursuing FCoE. Notably, neither Cisco (the leading proponent of FCoE) nor Brocade (the leading Fibre Channel vendor) were on the panel.

The day after I wrote and filed this story, I had breakfast with Shashi Kiran, Cisco’s director of market management for data center and virtualization. I mentioned the fact that so few people at the session were actively pursuing FCoE in their data centers. Kiran said he wasn’t surprised. The network engineers at Interop are simply building and managing resilient networks. They aren’t necessarily deciding whether FCoE will run over them. He said that storage managers are the ones who are truly interested in FCoE. If someone were to ask for a similar show of hands during a session at EMC World, which took place simultaneously with Interop, you would see a lot more hands raised, Kiran said. It’s a fair point, so I thought I’d share it here.

Data center fabric convergence: Many take the iSCSI route

Shamus McGillicuddy — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 22:23:36 +0000

Apparently attendees at Gartner’s Data Center Summit held in Las Vegas last month weren’t too enthusiastic on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as an avenue toward data center network convergence. In a brief note based on findings at the meeting, “Data Center Summit Attendees Cast Doubts on Breadth of FCoE Deployments,” Gartner analysts Joe Skorupa and Robert Passmore say that more attendees were looking at IP-based storage protocol iSCSI or network-attached storage (NAS) as alternatives to FCoE for I/O convergence.

Of the 100 attendees the analysts surveyed at the show 27% said they are already converging with NAS and iSCSI, 23% are planning to use NAS and iSCSI and 32% plan to use FCoE in the next three years. No one reported using FCoE today.

In the conversations I’ve had with data center and networking pros, it sounds like the convergence path a company takes will mostly depend on the infrastructure they already have in place. Fibre Channel shops will want to use FCoE in order to get more out of their storage area network investments. iSCSI shops will see no reason to invest in FCoE. They’ll just upgrade to lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet and converge iSCSI and production traffic onto the same wire.

Interop: Fibre Channel over Ethernet demo by Ethernet Alliance

Shamus McGillicuddy — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:31:47 +0000

While walking the floor at Interop Las Vegas last week, I met with Brad Booth, chairman of the Ethernet Alliance, who demonstrated Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). In this video, you can see how the Ethernet Alliance used priority flow control and enhanced transmission selection to protect video traffic moving over FCoE. As Brad describes, this video features a NetApp Fibre Channel array sending Fibre Channel and ISCSI traffic across an Ethernet network into two servers. The servers are sending streaming video to a monitor while a Finisar Xgig traffic generator is blasting the network with simulated traffic.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/nmdIvcGEXFw" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Broadcom takeover bid for Emulex about converged Ethernet?

Shamus McGillicuddy — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:29:23 +0000

Broadcom is making a $764-million hostile takeover bid for Emulex, a manufacturer of storage networking infrastructure, such as host bus adaptors and I/O controllers. Broadcom, a maker of wireless and wired networking semiconductors, appears to have Emulex’s emergent Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) converged network adapters in its sites.

Cisco, Brocade and other networking vendors are evangelizing the concept of converged Ethernet for data centers, where storage and data networks are converged on a single network fabric. FCoE is a key element of this movement. If it takes off, convergenced Ethernet could reduce the number of network connections on servers and simplify data center networking in general.

If Broadcom succeeds in grabbing Emulex, it would be well-positioned to produce the semiconductors that enable this new networking paradigm. Emulex leadership, however, seems uninterested in selling out to Broadcom. Broadcom first approached Emulex about a merger in January, but Exmulex said ‘No thanks.”