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Open-Sourcing Fibre Channel over EthernetDATE: 19-DEC-2007 Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst for StorageIO, an infrastructure technology analysis and consulting firm, was more optimistic in an interview. "Intel opening up their kimonos and throwing their full support for FCoE is nothing but good for the emerging technology and surrounding ecosystem to help vendors get their software and drivers ready and avoid being a gating factor in the technology rollout."The future, Schulz said, "is converged fabrics and networks in the data center and while ultimately that might involve TCP/IP, for now, a major stepping stone and continued evolution from propriety storage interconnects and interfaces is to get on to a common underlying network interface infrastructure, and that is data center class Ethernet that supports both Fibre Channel and TCP/IP-based traffic concurrently without having to stack or layer protocols on top of each other."Looking ahead he sees "a continued downward trend on 2GFC and 4GFC with the advent and rollout of 8GFC on the Fibre Channel front and continued growing adoption of iSCSI at both 1GbE and in the future with 10GbE, with FCoE, that game realistically … is probably at least 18 months out." That may not be such a bad thing though because it will give "time for those needing to jump from 4GFC to 8GFC and then for their next jump, the option of going to FCoE and continue on the Fibre Channel FCP/FICON route, or to leverage the same adapter and run iSCSI or NAS, or to jump to standard Ethernet and run iSCSI and NAS [network-attached storage]." Schulz foresees FCoE being used for short-haul data traffic. "FCoE is not for spanning distances—that's where FCIP or Fibre Channel mapped to IP comes into play. FCoE is for the data center [that needs] low latency, quality of service and so forth for good performance. This performance will help both FCoE and iSCSI when using this new form of Ethernet."At the end of the day, it's 10GB Ethernet and Data Center Ethernet (PDF link) that Schulz believes is more important than just FCoE. "Bottom line is that Data Center Ethernet, which is at the heart or [the] underlying enabler for FCoE, is more than just Fibre Channel over Ethernet. Data Center Ethernet also means enhanced performance for iSCSI, NAS and for implementing I/O virtualization in general in the data center," said Schulz. Check out eWEEK.com's Storage Center for the latest news, reviews and analysis on enterprise and small business storage hardware and software.
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