Comments on: Brocade buys Foundry, validating Cisco Data Center Strategy

By: Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 04:05:02 +0000

Ben,
FCoE simply transports original FC frames from the Initiator to a Target. So an FC exchange over FCoE is only as fast as the Initiator, which today is a 4Gbps FC chip on a CNA (Converged Network Adapter). The interest in FCoE is largely for its potential to consolidate infrastructure, reduce cabling, reduce adapters, and simplify the data center operations and topology. FCoE, at least today, is not a performance play but rather a CapEx and OpEx optimization play.

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 07:26:47 +0000

I was wondering does FCoE perfomance faster than a native FC?
i.e Nexus 7000 only have FCoE and if their perfomance is better than a MDS 9000 FC.

By: Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:51:13 +0000

I haven’t seen FCoE ignite the same fight that VoIP did 8 years ago. In every customer discussion I have had about Nexus 5000 the Server & Storage teams attended the meetings and all were very interested and engaged, there was no animosity or hostility, just tons of great questions.

FCoE is good for the Server & Storage teams. FCoE gets more servers connected to Storage. When every server that is Ethernet connected is also by default SAN connected, that makes the Storage guy much more important and valuable.

FCoE is a win/win scenario.

By: Etherealmind

Etherealmind — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:21:47 +0000

Now we get to see a repeat of the Telephony / VoIP fight. Storage people in one corner, and Networking in the other corner.

Storage people now claiming Ethernet is a networking technology (oh stop it, stop tickling me) after their much vaunted Fibre Channel “networking” technology seems to have lost its mojo.

Is this the start of Storage networking actually moving to IP, oh No, the sky is falling Chicken Little.