FCoE is a great dead end

Thu. Apr. 10, 2008

Since coming to Dell from EqualLogic, I've been trying to figure out the lay of the land.  You know, what's the new politically correct thing to say and all that. I want to make the Inside IT blog work and I'd rather not start a bunch of problems with new co-workers. But, I've been a bit soft lately as a result and that's not good.

So, here's what I think about FCoE.  Its about as stupid as a technology could be. Vendors making it just want to generate higher margins with a new technology.  They want you to think its going to be better than the alternatives because they will be able to charge more for it. That's how it is with all new technologies.  The discussions about network performance are hogwash. There will be more expensive surprises and more technical frustrations than native Fibre Channel has had.  How big is your budget for FCoE professional services?  Better start saving for it now.

Furthermore, I don't believe the convergence arguments for FCoE are valid. Do storage administrators really think merging storage and data networks is a good idea? Even for iSCSI networks, I believe the best practice is to keep storage and data networks separate.  They are both mission critical and putting them together only increases the likelihood that problems with one will negatively impact the other. 

If you already have Fibre Channel you have to check it out as a professional responsibility, but my recommendation is to be skeptical until FCoE shows proven bottom line benefits.

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Only published comments... Thursday, April 10, 2008 05:16 AM
by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger
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Nik Simpson said:

 Couldn't agree more with you Marc. FCoE is all about preserving FC revenues and business model. I just love the way all the FC vendors are preaching from the same hymn book on this, reminds of that Ben Franklin quote " We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

I particularly like the focus on preserving the FC management model, like that's anything worthy of preservation! 

April 10, 2008 9:29 AM
John Spiers said:
Mark, I’m glad you brought this up. I totally agree.  FCOE is Fibre Channel’s only hope to keep pace with the Ethernet bandwidth progression from the current 10 Gig going to 100Gig. Of course the FC guys are counting their money from the potential of two lucrative upgrade cycles; have everyone replace their gear with 8 Gbps FC and then make them rip-and-replace it with FCoE gear.  FCoE isn’t routable and doesn’t have congestion management, which relegates it to the four walls of the data center on pristine networks. They are trying to develop a bunch of hacks to Ethernet to provide congestion notification (the IEEE 802.1Qau), enhanced transmission selection (IEEE 802.1Qaz) and priority-based flow control (the IEEE PFC). What’s shocking about all this is that TCP/IP already has all this, plus it’s routable.  

This is a classic example of vendors trying to re-design technology that already exists just to save their market. The only benefit I see, and it’s marginal at best, is the opportunity for lower cost connectivity to existing Fibre Channel gear, but why not just replace that gear with iSCSI and save yourself from having to purchase FCoE switches and FCoE HBAs for all your servers. With iSCSI you get all the promised benefits of  FCoE with the additional benefit of a routable protocol, which gives you SAN based remote replication over standard networks without costly Fibre channel to IP bridge equipment. Not to mention a converged IP network.

April 11, 2008 10:54 AM

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