8-Gig Fibre Hits Roadmaps

Hardware vendors are quietly planning to roll out the first 8-Gbit/s Fibre Channel products within a year, though users may still take some convincing to make the leap from 4 Gbit/s.

"Our OEMs are driving us to have 8-Gbit/s products to them by the end of '07," Jim McCluney, the CEO of HBA manufacturer Emulex told Byte & Switch today.

It is likely to be sometime in 2008, though, before the vendor's OEM partners, which include IBM, Dell, HP, and Sun, push products out to market. "Most of the server and storage people will take a year to test these things out," he says.

Emulex's rival QLogic is also planning to crank up its 8-Gbit/s strategy in 2007 to meet demand from OEMs. "All of our Fibre Channel products will roll to 8-gig, both switches and HBAs, as soon as possible," says Frank Berry, QLogic's VP of marketing.

Factors driving demand for 8-Gbit/s Fibre Channel include the growing popularity of video applications and server virtualization, according to Berry. "Video is on the top of the list -- those guys can never get enough performance, there's no such thing as too much bandwidth."Virtualization, which is increasingly finding its way into enterprise data centers, is also a big factor in vendors' 8-Gbit/s plans. (See Users Look Ahead to 2007, Virtual Iron, Users Talk Virtual Tension, and Tales From the Virtual Crypt.) "Virtualization creates more I/O, so users want to make sure that the pipe to the network is big enough for multiple virtual machines," says Berry.

At least one user, though, told Byte and Switch that he is unmoved by vendor hype. "If we're not going to stress the systems enough to justify 8-gig, we would probably stay with 2-gig," says John Careccia, computer services manager at Lane County, Oregon. Careccia may consider using 8 Gbit/s technology for a business continuity and disaster recovery SAN he is planning to deploy in 2008, although even this is not certain. Cost could be a deciding factor. "We would really have to look at what we were getting on 8-gig and look at the ROI," he explains.

There is still a big question mark hanging over the cost implications of 8-Gbit/s Fibre Channel SANs. A recent Byte and Switch Insider report, for example, questioned whether current standard copper-based twisted-pair cabling can handle the higher transmission rate over more than 25 meters. (See Insider: 4-Gig's Successor Uncertain.) The move to 8 Gbit/s may therefore require more expensive cabling, which would eliminate one of the biggest drivers of the current transition from 2 Gbit/s to 4 Gbit/s.

Even Cisco is not getting carried away with all the 8-Gbit/s brouhaha. "Do we see a lot of applications driving demand for 8-Gig? No," says Rajeev Bhardwaj, director of product management at the vendor's data center division.

The exec admits that virtualization could change this. And he insists that Cisco has been gearing up for 8-Gbit/s Fibre Channel on its own MDS 9500 director switches. (See Cisco Goes 4-Gig & Big, EMC Certifies Cisco Director, and Cisco's Storage Slows.) "The MDS portfolio is 8-gig ready today," insists Bhardwaj. "That means that I can take an 8-gig line card and put it into existing 9500 Series directors."At this stage, though, the vendor is playing its, ahem, line card close to its chest, and Bhardwaj refused to say when the 8-Gbit/s card will be available. "We're not ready to share our roadmaps with the market," he says. "I would say that in the 2008 timeframe, we will start seeing early deployments."

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch