Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) has been a hot topic of discussion in the enterprise storage world lately, but many end users are just now hearing about it.  Although some folks seem to think it’s here with a vengance, others doubt that it will ever make the splash it promises, with 8 Gb FC, iSCSI, and even AoE (ATA over Ethernet) showing more promise.  There has been some back and forth, and even a little backpedaling.

What do you think?  If you’re a Plaxo user, I created a poll over there to see if folks think it will rise, and when.

Beth Pariseau over at SearchStorage.com has another great interview, this time with “Mr. SCSI”, Larry Boucher of Alacritech. Despite being early to market with TCP offload engine (TOE) Ethernet NICs, and iSCSI HBAs in particular, the company has been less successful than many would have expected. This is probably because most folks just didn’t use ‘em - iSCSI works fine with a plain-Jane gigabit NIC on today’s modern computers.

Boucher suspects (as do I) that 10 Gb speed will make TOEs much more critical, and he expects Alacritech to be well positioned to take advantage of this shift.  He sees TOE becoming integrated with future PC chipsets, and not just for storage.  Asked when he expects “the year of 10 gigabit” to come, Boucher estimated 2009.  Sounds reasonable to me!

EMC’s Mark Lewis posted another thoughtful “blog episode”, outlining five predictions he has for the next few years. I don’t really agree with him much more than I did the last time, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless! Continue Reading »

Cisco’s new product announcements this week got me thinking about our little storage pond.  Sure, VFrame isn’t breaking any new ground compared to Scalent, HP’s Opsware, and BladeLogic, but it’ll be a revelation to Cisco’s customers.  Remember, all the iPod had going for it was Apple’s brand name, customer base, and flawless execution!

The point is, VFrame makes no differentiation between storage and networking, just like Cisco itself.  Look across the rest of Cisco’s storage product line and if you squint hard enough you might be looking at their network line!  This was Cisco’s big contribution to the storage industry: bringing along everything they learn about networking.  For some reason, the rest of the Fibre Channel equipment makers were unable to take the lessons from networking and apply them to storage until Cisco came along.

Cisco’s new switch hardware continues to blur the line between storage and networking.  Although storage products are still separated from network equipment within the company, it’s clear that there’s a lot of technology sharing going on.  I wonder if the advent of 10 gigabit Ethernet will cause the two product lines to come even closer.

Clearly, it’s difficult to differentiate the products - just read the Byte and Switch article about Cisco’s announcement and watch James Rogers “seamlessly” blend Fibre Channel and Ethernet!  Yeah, yeah, like I’ve never made a mistake before!

Edit: Yup, I guess Raffo and the rest are alive - Byte and Switch swapped out the references to “4 gbit/s Ethernet”…