Getting Fired Up Over FCOE

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE), although still in its infancy, is already proving to be a controversial technology, even for some of its biggest proponents.

Switch vendor Brocade, for example, used its recent Technology Day to roll out its FCOE strategy, but, intriguingly, urged users not to get carried away with all the vendor hype surrounding the technology.

We believe that, over the next six to eighteen months, FCOE will start to emerge and start to be deployed in a number of non-production and mid-tier environments,” said Ian Whiting, general manager of Brocade’s data center infrastructure division.

The vendor, which expects to have FCOE products generally available through OEMs early next year, was clearly eager for users not to get swept up with vendors’ promises of a unified networks Nirvana.

Although users can streamline their cabling (and potentially save money) by running Fibre Channel over existing Ethernet links, Brocade’s Whiting warned that FCOE will not necessarily be a cheap alternative to traditional Ethernet.“We think that, initially, the price points will be higher because you’re talking about 10-Gig Ethernet, not Ethernet,” he told Byte and Switch. “It’s an interesting technology, but it’s not going to replace Fibre Channel as a method to connect your servers to storage anytime soon.”

Brocade’s rival Cisco, which launched its Nexus 5000 unified fabric switch earlier this year, is painting a much rosier picture of FCOE.

”We actually have [a] shipping product, so we have some experience with how the customer adoption is going,” sniped Jackie Ross, Cisco’s vice president of partner marketing. “[And] we’re seeing a different view.”

The Cisco exec explained that “multiple hundreds” of customers are evaluating the Nexus 500 in areas such as financial services, telecommunications, health care, government, and the service provider sector.

”We will see production deployments around the August timeframe,” added Ross. “We believe that we will start to see production [deployments] in numbers before the end of calendar year 08.”The exec also challenged Brocade’s comments about the cost benefits of FCOE, claiming that the technology has a competitive TCO.

”[If] You’re cutting by 50 percent the amount of cabling and the amount of adapters, then you have a very compelling TCO,” she said, adding that the Nexus 5000 has pushed the cost of 10-Gbit/s Ethernet down to $900 a port.

A number of vendors, including Intel, Emulex, QLogic, and NetApp are already offering FCOE products, although many users are awaiting full ratification of the FCOE standard, which should happen by the end of this year.

Almost half of the IT managers polled by Byte and Switch earlier this year said that they are waiting for full standardization of the FCOE specs before deploying the technology, with only 19 percent prepared to start now.

Despite this degree of caution, almost three quarters of respondents said that they are interested in FCOE, although 59 percent expect that the technology will have hidden costs.Like any new technology, FCOE will have its pros and cons, although these will only become really apparent when the first early adopters start to discuss their experiences. Until that time, we are going to be stuck listening to vendors’ endless spiels about what the technology can and can’t do.

Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.