Fibre Channel Over Ethernet: From Fee To Free

alphadogg writes "With demand for Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) more sluggish than vendors had hoped, 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch and adapter makers are making it available for free. FCoE is a standard driven largely by Cisco to converge customers' data center LAN and storage fabrics with 10G Ethernet. Industry heavyweights Intel and Brocade are among those now giving away FCoE capabilities. There are several factors prompting vendors to slash FCoE prices or stop charging for it altogether, including market indifference; technological immaturity; competing alternatives, such as virtualized Fibre Channel and Ethernet I/O; the recession; and vendors looking to drive switch volumes. 'When FCoE first came out there used to be a fairly large price premium,' says Alan Weckel, director of Dell'Oro Group. 'Cisco had to give it away for free to drive switch volumes. Users were not adopting as rapidly as thought or that Cisco had hoped for.'"

CSCO forward guidance is low

[Anonymous Coward]

Their stock was killed last week ... down below $20. I know, I own some. They are just trying to generate business, kind of like those 'tards who are pushing 3D TV.

And still, no one buys it.

[7213]

FCoE...

A solution in search of a problem. 10GbE ethernet is really very nice. FC (and FCoE included) have a history of poor vender interop.

So by using FCoE you get the worst of both worlds, 10GbE with vendor lockin at the storage level....

So... NFS anyone (or I guess iScsi)?

Only time i've ever used FCoE was as a WAN tunnel link for asynch rep.... not seeing any other value for this anytime soon.

Re:Too late

[guruevi]

I think he meant that FC is not routable as the standard IP protocol is unless you buy expensive and proprietary solutions (as you call it, a hack).

  iSCSI has the advantage of being able to sustain a packet loss while FCoE can't stand it. FCoE is thus only possible over a small fabric (eg. 1 stack of dedicated switches) while iSCSI can be mixed with other traffic without sustaining any issues. Off course, some people using iSCSI can't sustain any packet losses either (because of latency - eg. streaming video and live video editing) and don't understand that Ethernet is not built for that kind of load - network engineers don't care about packet losses and hope the transport layer will fix them, storage engineers can't have any packet losses and the transport layer relies on it.

That being said, FCoE is similar to ATAoE, never widespread because of it's iSCSI cousin and those that ended up using it, might as well just used a true FC (or Infiniband) fabric.

I will admit though, performance is impressive....

[Desmoden]

With no tuning (other than Jumbo frames for FCoE) I was able to get 9.7Gb/s using FCoE over 10Gb ethernet.

While 16Gb FCP/FC is around the corner, you will be able to run FCoE over 40Gb and 100Gb ethernet in 2-3 yrs. (at MUCH $$)

Keep in mind however, iSCSI has been around for over 10yrs now. These things take time to grow, mature, attach.

So lets wait a few more years before declaring anything dead or alive =)

And keep in mind, FCoE is not meant to replace FCP/FC, its meant to fix what is keeping iSCSI from doing better.