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I Don’t Believe In FCoE

 

Lukas Kubin Submitted by Lukas Kubin on April 28th, 2008

I don’t believe in FCoE. I don’t believe in a storage protocol built from the first layer up. I don’t believe in people needing another set of adapters, switches and controllers. I just see a bunch of vendors building a new playground for their old machines. Why? Maybe they missed a train of innovation. Do they need a new protocol? I don’t think so. Rather they need to fight against the iSCSI newcomers who proved there was more to show than just a dual controller.

I’ve seen many articles celebrating Fibre Channel protocol for its all-layers-storage concept. I was celebrating too. Then we received our first iSCSI array based on a hardware iSCSI implementation. We did our standard benchmarks and found the array was performing better than most of fibre arrays we had seen before. We got 96% of that cable’s throughput in sequential operations. That was the time where I lost the idea the all-storage protocol matters.

Although it might not look that way, I still think there is space for protocol innovation. Actually, I would like to see more application support built in to storage protocols. The trend I see with our customers is building highly available applications. As the applications store their data through storage protocols, storage protocols could transfer information about completed transactions, flushed buffers, etc., helping to keep data consistent and available on multiple places.

 

2 Responses to “I Don’t Believe In FCoE”

  1. Geoff Mitchell Says:
    April 28th, 2008 at 7:44 am

    Not one storage array or plumbing company has managed to detail any reason why I would move from FC8 to FCOE.

    I can see why large SANs may remain on FC over moving to 10Gb iSCSI. Believe me when I understand the concepts of risk mitigation and evolution over revolution.
    Why then would a storage administrator move from FC8 to FCOE for arguably no performance improvement, no savings in costs and increasing risk due to the newer protocol, when there is 10+ years established risk mitigation in fibre-channel?

    Cost savings, you say? Well, if this is the only driver, the choice must be 10Gb iSCSI, which gets the customer out of proprietary FCOE plumbing, has 3+ years more track record from a reliability perspective.

  2. Dell-Marc_Farley Says:
    April 28th, 2008 at 11:19 am

    Geoff, I agree. Stephen Foskett and others believe there is a lot to gain by merging storage with their LANs in a single fabric. (yes, yes I know – using virtualized networking and all that).

    I don’t think Fabric unification is all that important, but I don’t run a big data center either. Like you, if its a matter of cost, then I think iSCSI makes more sense. That said, there needs to be a scaling up of iSCSI products, which hasn’t happened yet.

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