Comments on: iSCSI’s $360M vote of confidence

By: L. Davis

L. Davis — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:56:21 +0000

I think too much continues to be made of the alledged inability of FCoE to ‘route’ FCoE frames, as if this implies that the protocol is defective in some way.

FCoE supports Fibre Channel Shortest Path First Protocol (FCSP), which is an implementation of OSPF at layer 2 of the protocol stack. FCoE (and Fibre Channel)have no trouble figuring out how to send layer 2 frames to the appropriate destinations.

For those who need to make forwarding decisions at layer 3, Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) is available, since FCoE and Fibre Channel are interoperable.

By: Stan

Stan — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:36:46 +0000

Why make it a choice? There are architectures out there that are network agnostic like DataCore that support iSCSI, FC and FCOE.

By: Steven Schwartz

Steven Schwartz — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:58:34 +0000

I think the difference between FCoE and iSCSI is staggering, yet they are being readily compared.

Remember that FC and FCoE has no routing abilities native to the protocols. iSCSI is layered on top the the TCP/IP and UDP/IP network protocols, this allows much different flexibility.

Also, and it remains to be seen once the FCoE standard is finalized, but my gut says FCoE will being the same SAN management problems that learning curve that FC has in today’s data centers.

I think FC isn’t going to go away, many customers still have 1Gb FC deployed still, and adoption of 4Gb FC at the host have been slower then expected.

Also, I have to continue to comment on the fact that comparing LeftHand Networks to Equallogic isn’t relative, nor fair. LeftHand Networks is and has always been a software product and company. Equallogic has a purpose built storage array, both hardware IP and Software IP.