Series: FCoE Reality Check «

March 21, 2013

Why I Am Biased Against FCoE

October 21, 2011 by Stephen 14 Comments

I am biased against FCoE because it’s too new to be blithely and broadly recommended for production enterprise use. That’s all. Yes, the standards are standardized and there are products extant. But that’s not enough for me.

Filed Under: Computer History, Enterprise storage, Features, Personal, Virtual Storage Tagged With: 16 Gb, 8 Gb, best practices, FC-BB5, FCoE, Fibre Channel, Interop, J Metz, standards

Multi-Hop FCoE Is Not Ready For Prime Time (Yet)

October 21, 2011 by Stephen 10 Comments

This big V8 is a "mild hybrid", delivering some of the benefit and all of the feel-good without changing the world...

I know that a number of FCoE-related standards are settled, and I know that there are products in the market and even some limited multi-vendor compatibility. I even accept that some customers are deploying real “Full Monty FCoE” in production. But I just can’t recommend that technology yet: It’s not prudent, widespread, and low-risk, so I say it’s not ready for prime time.

Filed Under: Computer History, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage Tagged With: Brocade, Brook Reams, Cisco, Dell, FabricPath, FC-BB5, FCoE, FEX, Greg Ferro, HP, J Metz, Joe Onisick, Juniper, Mike Fratto, Tony Bourke, TRILL

Eight Unresolved Questions About FCoE

January 5, 2012 by Stephen 16 Comments

It's not going to be this easy to bridge Fibre Channel and Ethernet!

What elements remain unresolved to make FCoE truly world-class? What should the vendors be prioritizing?

Filed Under: Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage Tagged With: 10GBASE-T, Brocade, Cisco, CNA, Corey Hines, David Hardaker, Derick Winkworth, Dmitri Kalintsev, Ethernet, FCF, FCIP, FCoE, Fibre Channel, iFCP, Ivan Pepelnjak, J Metz, Juan Lage, LoM, MPIO, OpenFCoE, TCP/IP, Tech Field Day, Tony Bourke, TRILL, vxlan, zoning

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