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.

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/pages/dcbridges.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/datacenter/comments/setting_the_record_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://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/2008/04/fcoe-gets-buzz.html

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.

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).