Comments

1. Benson Schliesser says:

   8 July 2008 at 01:28

   Greg, FCoE is already avail­able in lim­ited foot­print: the Cisco Nexus 5k sup­port­ing 10GE NICs from sev­eral vendors can con­nect FCoE to an exist­ing FC SAN.

   The really inter­est­ing thing to watch will be how this foot­print grows as data­cen­ter eth­er­net tech­no­lo­gies are developed and imple­men­ted. The work being done in the IEEE and IETF is being led by folks from Cisco, Brocade, as well as oth­ers (don’t dis­miss the start-​​ups!), and they all seem to be tak­ing slightly dif­fer­ent approaches to mak­ing their products avail­able to the market.

   For some of them, pre-​​standard or pro­pri­et­ary fea­tures will be neces­sary to their strategy. But over time I believe we’ll see the same pat­tern that we’ve seen many times before: they’ll all con­verge on a stand­ard after it settles down (and they’ve claimed their piece of the pre-​​standard market).

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   • Greg Ferro says:

     8 July 2008 at 06:45

     Sure, you can clearly see that, but it isn’t here now. It won’t be here this year, or next year. If you believe the hype, or are deceived by it, you might buy first gen­er­a­tion equip­ment that will need repla­cing (like the Catalyst 6000).

     The mar­ket­ing mes­sage is ‘FCoE is here and you should be buy­ing’, Cisco sales reps are cer­tainly be led to believe that they have some­thing to sell. Cisco cer­tainly wants the product put onto cus­tomer roadmaps, and is mak­ing a big push into get­ting their mes­sage across.

     But fun­da­ment­als are that

     1) DCE is man­dat­ory for FCoE
     2) DCE will make iSCSI work very nicely indeed
     3) iSCSI will be more appeal­ing to the mar­ket than FCoE and thus likely to over­take FCoE.
     4) DCE is barely star­ted on the stand­ards pro­cess, and it only takes one major player to derail and delay it.
     5) Infiniband already out­per­forms FCoE and offers a bet­ter future than iSCSI.

     It hard to see FCoE being successful.

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2. Omar Sultan says:

   8 July 2008 at 08:36

   Greg:

   I guess its help­ful to do a couple of things. First, we need to sep­ar­ate con­jec­ture from fact and second, we need to sep­ar­ate a given vendor’s product roadmap from the pace of innov­a­tion of the industry as a whole.

   Let’s start with the asser­tion that DCE is pro­pri­et­ary, etc and will cause all man­ner of evil. This would fall under the cat­egory of con­jec­ture, and wish­ful con­jec­ture at that. Both “CEE” and “DCE” are trade­marked terms, just dif­fer­ent trade­mark hold­ers. The actual IEEE term is Data Center Bridging (DCB — http://​www​.ieee802​.org/​1​/​p​a​g​e​s​/​d​c​b​r​idges.html), and, as with other aspects of the Ethernet stand­ards, Cisco is deeply involved in the stand­ards pro­cess behind DCB. The bot­tom line is that Cisco is focus­ing its efforts on deliv­er­ing a standards-​​based solu­tion. End of story.

   As far as the time­frame? Well, pre-​​standard solu­tions are avail­able from “star­tups” like Cisco and Intel today. Cisco is ship­ping the Nexus 5000 and Intel is ship­ping 10GbE FCoE adaptors today. Emulex and Qlogic have already announced their Converged Network Adaptors (CNA) and expect them to ship by late sum­mer. Finally, Paul Brown, VP of Integration and Interoperability for EMC has stated “Today EMC is work­ing with Cisco to qual­ify the Cisco Nexus 5000 in our E-​​Lab in order to provide cus­tom­ers with a com­plete uni­fied fab­ric solu­tion, tar­get­ing cus­tomer deploy­ments in 2H CY2008.” For more details on vendor inter­op­er­ab­il­ity test­ing, check out Deepak Munjal’s post: http://​blogs​.cisco​.com/​d​a​t​a​c​e​n​t​e​r​/​c​o​m​m​e​n​t​s​/​s​e​t​t​i​n​g​_​t​h​e​_​r​e​c​o​r​d​_straight/

   In my exper­i­ence, we are seek­ing trac­tion on a couple of fronts. The first areas is green­field deploy­ments where cus­tom­ers are look­ing to build-​​out their next-​​gen infra­struc­ture. However, we are also see­ing sig­ni­fic­ant interest for brown­field scen­arios where uni­fied fab­ric will help cus­tom­ers with sprawl, power, cool­ing, TCO, etc. Remember, one of the bene­fits of the Nexus 5000 is that it can be inser­ted in a fairly trans­par­ent man­ner so the hurdles for imple­ment­a­tion are quite low and the bene­fits quite accessible.

   With regards to the fun­da­ment­als lis­ted in your response, I would respect­fully dis­agree. I think the whole iSCSI vs. FCoE debate is a red her­ring. While I think the mar­ket will even­tu­ally buy-​​off on a uni­fied fab­ric archi­tec­ture, I don’t think the entire stor­age mar­ket, across all mar­ket seg­ments, is so homo­gen­ous that it will con­verge on a single tech­no­logy. iSCSI, FCoE and IB will all have their adher­ents, so I think that it is dif­fi­cult to say one pro­tocol is bet­ter or more appeal­ing than another – it all depends on tech­nical, fin­an­cial and busi­ness con­text. Heck, I am bet­ting that a) plain old FC will still have a healthy pres­ence 10 years from now, and b) many cus­tom­ers will have a mix of FCoE and iSCSI run­ning across their Ethernet networks.

   I guess we could chat a bit about the long-​​term viab­il­ity of FCoE, but I think this response has got­ten a bit long as it is. Instead, per­haps you can check out this post on Chuck Hollis’ blog: http://​chucks​b​log​.type​pad​.com/​c​h​u​c​k​s​_​b​l​o​g​/​2​0​0​8​/​0​4​/​f​c​o​e​-​g​e​t​s​-buzz.html

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3. GIo says:

   4 February 2009 at 20:40

   Cisco is always try­ing to lock-​​in all the cus­tom­ers with propi­et­ory approaches. The most recent example is “Enhanced PoE”. This tech­no­logy will be aban­don by CISCO as soon as PoE+ is being used. There is only “ONE” decide that uses Ehanced PoE (Cisco AP1252.

   Other examples of Cisco lock-​​in cus­tom­ers: CDP devices, IGRP, EIGRP,ISL… All of these approaches have been or are being replaced by stand­ard based approaches like LLDP, OSPF and LACP.

   CEE is stand­ard approach sup­por­ted by the Brocade, Cisco and 14 more vendors. DCE is only sup­por­ted by CISCO and two other Cisco part­ners. Standard based CCE and FCoE will be phased-​​in slowly in SAN environements.

   Cisco is try­ing to jump the gun to cap­ture cus­tomer with pro­pri­et­ory approaches, JUST rem­emeber CISCO is NOT the dom­in­ant force in the Fiber Channel Arena.

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