23rd May 2012

More People Against FCoE – Part 2

More posts from people who are opposed to FCoE. More meat for the mill….

Is FCoE a Diabolical Plot?; Musings on SNW’s Day 2 FCoE Announcements

Favourite bit:

…. my guess is that the FC vendors concocted a plan: Use FCoE to connect all enterprise servers, get a few analysts on board to endorse the idea and then convince end-users to take their eyes off the longer term ramifications of using FCoE. By getting enterprise users to bite on FCoE and spend the next few years connecting their remaining 85% of their servers to existing FC SANs, users are locked into FC for the next 10 years until the next disruptive technology comes along.

Brocade, EqualLogic tussle over Fibre Channel and iSCSI supremacy

This guy cranks out the markitecture like a machine:

Data centers worldwide have an enormous investment in Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure. That global installed base has thoroughly demonstrated its end-user value in providing high performance, high availability, data protection and economies through consolidation of enterprise storage assets.

iSCSI has not demonstrated the performance and proven track record of manageability for mission-critical data center operations, but has proven to be an excellent technology for integrating low-cost second-tier servers and applications into data center SAN best practices.

blah blah blah corporate blah…. insert more marketing borg noise ….

A marketing manager from Dell gives FCoE a good kicking (since Dell don’t have any FC, they resell EMC/Brocade/Cisco for that)- FCoE is a great dead end.

Cisco responds…

Dante Malgrino who seems to be in charge of Cisco FCoE boat, agrees that FCoE has a limited shelf life.

iSCSI is perfect for environments where there is no FIbre Channel legacy and maybe there is no existing IT competence around Fibre Channel. Small-Medium Businesses will greatly benefit of iSCSI and possibly also some larger environments where storage consolidation has not happened, yet.

Well said.

My favorite is this:

FCoE is not a new storage protocol, it is just a new transport for Fibre Channel; Fibre Channel sees an FCoE link as a different type of physical media and nothing else.

Fibrechannel always looked like a profit grab by storage companies, either to keep IBM away (stop customers using SBA) or to create their own standard. There was never much reason for using it, and you shouldn’t keep it going.

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About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus