Fibre Channel Over Ethernet: From Fee To Free

Posted by Soulskill on Monday February 14, 2011 @12:01PM from the investment-dollars-well-spent dept.

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.'"

1 of 87 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

It's all about what the swich is capable of by sirwired · 2011-02-14 13:00 · Score: 5, Informative

Your plain-vanilla 10GbE switch does not have the flow-control bits required to make Ethernet lossless; without essentially lossless traffic, SCSI/FC perf goes in the dumpster. (0.03% packet loss == approx. 50% performance cut.)
In addition, there must be at least one switch in the VLAN that can provide FC services, such as zoning, address assignment, name services, etc.