FCoE, iSCSI, FC, and the quest for Unified Fabric
The blogosphere has been alight these past months with discussions and rants about the “impending war” between iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)…Who will win, what will it mean for the industry and where should customers put their IT budgets. Add to this Data Center Ethernet (DCE), Fibre Channel pushing 8GB and 10GB iSCSI moving into the limelight.
Having been doing this for a while I’ve seen this movie a few times…different actors, same plot. The way I see it, FCoE is going to be a waste of time and money for most folks…iSCSI is mainstream, performs well, has a massive ecosystem and with 10GB iSCSI hitting its stride in 08/09, I don’t see FCoE being a viable solution. Those that bought HD-DVD players in the last year will relate: if the protocol doesn’t have massive support and industry inertia it’ll be money wasted and you’ll need to migrate to Blu-Ray the winner sooner or later.
So, let the vendors hack it out in the quest to buy their CEO’s even bigger yachts. Our pick is iSCSI. Unless you’ve got a significant investment in FC infra that you’d like to stretch for another couple of years, from what we’ve seen iSCSI is the way to go. FCoE will wind up on clearance cart along w/ Titanic HD-DVDs.
$virtual_page = "Scale_Datacom_Blog";