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.'"

Comments

Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

As network fabric bandwidth continued to increase and latency decrease, FCoE appeared to be a last ditch effort to plug the steady trickle of customers from the highly expensive FC over to the much cheaper to deploy iSCSI. I'm sure the thinking was that by making it routable and with the same semantics as existing FC installs, it could accomplish that task. However, I'm also thinking that in most situations, where there's little to distinguish between iSCSI and FCoE other than the now almost commonplace on-NIC hardware iSCSI acceleration, it's a case of too late.

Re:Duh

[afidel]

Actually FC has an inherent disadvantage and that is they ship about 5% of the ports per year that Ethernet does and so all their R&D has to be spread over 1/20th the ports. The vendors all realized this about 5 years ago and so they started on FCoE to spread their R&D budget over the much larger Ethernet ecosystem. I believe 16Gb FC will be the last standalone standard and that after that they will piggyback on Ethernet for 40Gbps and 100Gbps speeds. Speaking to industry insiders at Storage Networking World it's obvious that the days are numbered for standalone FC.

As to your claims that 10Gb FCoE is slower than 8Gb FC for throughput that's rubbish as the framing overhead for FCoE is nowhere near 20% and they are both lossless protocols, for latency it may or may not be true depending on implementation.