There has been some good chatter going around concerning FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) from both Scott Lowe and Chad Sakac. I had a chance to talk with Chad and Stuart Miniman today and I pretty much agree (go figure) with their thoughts, which align with Chad’s post.
For Varrow, in this context, we really see two types of customers. On the smaller side we have customers buying their first SAN. Even without FCoE they almost always choose iSCSI. It’s easy. It fits their environment. It doesn’t require the knowledge and capital to implement like a Fibre Channel fabric. Even some of the more mid-sized customers are choosing iSCSI over FC when moving up to newer storage arrays, especially if they are on older FC gear and need to refresh. The majority of their applications just don’t require the throughput of Fibre Channel, contrary to their initial beliefs in many cases.
Larger customers aren’t starting over with a new fabric and throwing out the old. They are either continuing on with their existing FC fabric and possibly expanding, or they are looking to supplement it with FCoE and eventually make a full migration. The “issue” of single-hop limitations and no native FCoE support in EMC arrays hasn’t been an issue. They put in a gateway type solution such as the Nexus 5000, for other benefits usually, and connect the legacy fabric to that and the new gear gets to use FCoE. As FCoE matures and people become more comfortable with it we’ll see more large scale deployments, and by then these issues will be a memory.
