Foundry Postpones Vote on Brocade Deal, Stock Plunges - Network World

The path to FCoE is not running smoothly is it?
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Are You Ready to Purchase a Brocade Ethernet Switch ? What ?

One of the more amusing byproducts of the FCoE marketing push, is that Brocade has announced that they will producing FCoE switches for their customers. So, are you ready to buy a Brocade Ethernet switch ? Read more

Data Centre Ethernet Standards Fight Brewing ? Brocade Says FCoE in 2010.

I note this quote from a recent article on The Register where Brocade talks about their future strategy.

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Data Networks - More Reliable to Than Storage Networks ?

I was participating in a storage design discussion and a Storage person threw up their most common complaint about networking - “we don’t know how to build reliable networks”. Let me take a shot at that. Read more

More People Against FCoE - Part 2

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

Not Anti FCoE, More Like Anti Fibrechannel - a Response

I got linked from Dante Malagrino at the Cisco Data Center blog yesterday. He writes a good post on why FCoE might be a good idea. Let me just say I am not only anti-FCoE, I am anti-Fibrechannel.

My rebuttal after the jump…

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Where Are All the Features for Nexus ? Or Is It Just Me ?

I wrote this in response to Omar Sultan at Cisco on ‘Why you want this switch ?

I was looking the NX-OS feature navigator today and NX-OS looks (currently) like a substantially feature-free platform - check out the NX-OS Feature Navigator and consider what is not listed here.

A couple of other things that strike me as odd:

• NX-OS has a primary marketing message that is based on technologies that do not yet exist (FCoE) or technology that only a few companies care much about (10GB Ethernet), or intangible elements like their new switching fabric
• Waxing lyrically about your ‘lights out sub-system’ smacks of desperation because there are not any other features to talk about.
• NX-OS remains an unknown.
• I still believe that NX-OS has been released to put a footprint in the space and slow down venture capital investments. You never know, they might have produced a product that could eat Cisco’s lunch.

Omar and Doug have a role in promoting the Nexus 7000. Lets make sure that we don’t go overboard with the markitecture. I would appreciate if they could quiet down the marketing so I can get some work done here. If another person comes up to me and asks whether I have seen the Nexus 7000 I am going to hit them with RITA.

As a long time veteran of many product releases, market announcements, platform announcements I remain deeply cynical. In some movie, a pretending person once said, “show me the money”. That’s what I want.

Postscript

I wrote more about the Nexus 7000 in a previous posting considering whether it is suitable for use today or tomorrow.

Is the Cisco Nexus 7000 Needed Today - or Tomorrow ?

No doubt that the Cisco Nexus 7000 switch is a fine piece of technology. The performance and throughput is welcome, and clearly offers some fine new capabilities such as virtualisation, ISSU, better OOB and so on. I am sure that everyone can perceive the positive messages, lets face it, Cisco isn’t going to be shy in telling us about them.

However, lets consider the issue from the perspective of the architect/designer and how Cisco has positioned this in the marketplace. From an architecture perspective, I will need to commit a substantial capex to the product and a much larger amount of resource cost to transition a network to use the product. Even if I am building new data centres (and thus have no legacy), changes to operating standards, procedures, management tools and other orchestration issues present substantial barriers to adoption.

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