High-Speed Drivers

3:20 PM -- It's easy, and tempting, to get caught up in the speeds-n-feeds aspect of storage networking.

Faster's always better, right? Bigger pipes and backplanes mean happier customers, don't they?

No.

Check out the discussion thread prompted by Dave Raffo's story about Cisco's 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel challenges. (See Cisco 4-Gbit Director MIA.)

As one of the early posters notes, 1 Gbit/s is fine for most hosts and many could get by on 100-Mbit/s Ethernet. Price cutting, notes another, means you can get 4 Gbit/s for the same price as 2 Gbit/s.Heresy or a splash of cold, cruel reality?

Check it out and weigh in.

Terry Sweeney, Editor in Chief, Byte and Switch