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Techtarget

Last week, the FC-BB-5 working group of the T11 Technical Committee unanimously approved a final standard for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Now the technology’s champion in the storage marketplace, Cisco Systems Inc., and some analysts expect the formally approved standard to drive adoption of the fledgling standard in the market.

Claudio DeSanti, a distinguished engineer at Cisco Systems and the T11 committee chairman, said there were no no significant changes to the specification for the standard between establishing “technical stability” with an earlier draft last fall and the final ratification. However, there were four members of the committee who voted No on the earlier version and then changed their votes to Yes on the final standard after “resolving communication” and clarifying some points about how the spec was written.

Even though vendors, including Cisco Systems, have already begun rolling out FCoE products based on the “technical stability” version of the standard, Tam Dell’Oro, founder and president at anaysts Dell’Oro Group, said a lack of an official standard has been known to stall adoption of new technologies in the networking market.

She cited the example of the IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless routers. Dell’Oro said her research has shown that an older, well-established version of the standard called 802.11g still accounts for 98% of the products purchased by telecom service providers over the 802.11n specification. “If enterprise users behave that way with that type of equipment, it would probably be the same with [FCoE],” she said.

An article talking about Fibre Channel over Ethernet, which has been a topic of debate with colleagues for a number of reasons. Unifying the storage and network down one pipe makes sense, it should further enable a reduction in the time it takes to deploy storage or network capacity in line with the business need, it should simplify connectivity by reducing the number and variants of patching and possibly empower or on-board new users to look at SAN storage, 10GB Ethernet etc, I might be buying kit which is enabled for this new medium. That said there remains the legacy infrastructure, the 100MB or even 10MB Ethernet networks which work, which deliver everything the end user needs and they wont be switched overnight, there are the enterprises that have invested in fibre big time and are unlikely to switch overnight, but let us not get too caught up in negative language or thoughts.

Is Fibre Channel over Ethernet for everyone? No but then neither is 10GB Ethernet, Grid, virtualization or solid state disk dependent on your technical and business requirements and constraints. What we will see though is that it will have every opportunity of becoming the default standard, that your server becomes Fibre Channel over Ethernet enabled, just like your server jumped to 1GB standard, as the cost of the adaptors falls, as more people realize the benefits of converging storage and network down the same connection for virtualization, for systems management and deployment, so it becomes available out of the box, but we’re some time away. What we need and we’re seeing that now, is the industry wide standards both technically, and in terms of best practice configurations/guides, that I know when I buy an adaptor for my server that it will work with any switch using agreed common standards, once we have that, coupled with multiple vendors, then we can get the econmies of scale, the comeptition in the market place to drive down the cost and drive up the adoption, exciting times are ahead.

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