March 19, 2010 -- The Fibre Channel SAN market is experiencing record growth and, as it does, the main players in Fibre Channel networking are fighting harder than ever for market share as converged networking gains traction.
Recently released data from the Dell'Oro Group shows that the Fibre Channel SAN market experienced a broad-based, record sequential revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2009, with both Fibre Channel switch and host bus adapter segments posting large increases.
According to the firm's "SAN Quarterly Report," Brocade, Cisco, Emulex and QLogic, had "strong sequential performances that helped propel the market to expand more than 15% quarter-over-quarter."
Seamus Crehan, vice president of Dell'Oro Group, said "the server upgrade cycle that started in the second quarter of 2009 was…a key driver of the Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter growth, especially 8Gbps."
Even more interesting is expected impact of unified fabric/converged networking technologies, specifically Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) running on converged network adapters (CNA).
The Dell'Oro Group's "SAN 5-Year Forecast Report," predicts that FCoE will be "a major growth contributor to both the Fibre Channel HBA market and the Ethernet network adapter market."
In a recent discussion about the HP-Cisco divorce, Taneja Group founder and consulting analyst Arun Taneja said converged networking is creating its own set of wars in the IT industry.
"The industry has become smart enough to say that Fibre Channel is not going anywhere. It's a sacred technology, but if you give me the same Fibre Channel that I am used to today and you want to put it on a different fabric, that's okay with me – hence Fibre Channel over Ethernet," he said. "Two worlds have collided in the form of one card called a converged network adapter that can act as a NIC for Ethernet traffic and support iSCSI or FCoE for Fibre Channel traffic. Broadcomm, Intel, Emulex, and QLogic are all vying for that market."
Taneja said customers are starting to take sides and that the market me be ripe for vendor consolidation.
"The winds are blowing fast and furious for Emulex and QLogic at the expense of Broadcomm and Intel," he said. "Ultimately, the one thing I can see that would bring everything back to a calm state is if Intel was to buy QLogic and Broadcomm buys Emulex."
Check out InfoStor's recent coverage of the Fibre Channel SAN market and FCoE:
HP to resell QLogic's enterprise FC switches
EMC taps QLogic for 8Gbps FC switches
Emulex: Running the Table at HP?
FCoE CNAs: HP/IBM tap Emulex, Cisco taps QLogic
Broadcom makes hostile bid for Emulex
Broadcom Enters Converged Network Adapter War
QLogic sues Emulex, but not over technology
Cisco-HP partnership implodes
Analysts weigh in on HP-Cisco breakup
Showing posts with label FCoE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FCoE. Show all posts
Friday, March 19, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
Unified fabrics: 10GbE iSCSI vs. FCoE
January 29, 2010 -- The consensus is that 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) will be the basis for unified fabrics/converged networks, but which storage protocol will become the de facto standard for SAN/LAN convergence?
In a recent study "Benefits Of SAN/LAN Convergence," conducted by Forrester Research and commissioned by Dell, 10GbE iSCSI ranks highest among users as the protocol of choice for unified fabrics.
Forrester conducted an online survey with 213 storage professionals in the US, UK, China, and the Netherlands, and 10 in-depth interviews of the same audience. The results show that more than double the respondents selected 10GbE iSCSI (56%) versus the next closest choice, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) (27%).
The study also revealed that 66% of respondents overall said that they are very interested or moderately interested in the concept of unified fabric or SAN/LAN convergence.
The reason for the iSCSI interest is mostly due to the adoption of server virtualization technology. Forrester claims that iSCSI is growing as protocol of choice for virtual server deployments. In a Forrester Research survey from January 2009, Fibre Channel led strongly in protocol selection for virtual server connection. This time around, Fibre Channel still leads the way, but iSCSI is closer behind.
According to Forrester, the data points to strong interest in unified fabrics, as well as interest in iSCSI in 10GbE format as a viable alternative to Fibre Channel storage.
Travis Vigil, a senior manager with Dell responsible for the company's line of EqualLogic iSCSI SAN products, says iSCSI was one of the few segments of the storage market to experience year-over-year growth of approximately 25%.
"The economic situation was an accelerator for iSCSI growth as customers looked to eliminate cost and complexity from their environments. The other contributing factor to the growth of iSCSI is server virtualization as we've seen more and more customers choose iSCSI as their fabric of choice," he says. "First time server virtualization customers find iSCSI to be a cost-effective technology."
Vigil also says iSCSI 10GbE will only make iSCSI better as Ethernet becomes the basis for unified network fabrics. "Fibre Channel over Ethernet is still developing, but iSCSI is here and now. Ten Gigabit Ethernet is only going to make iSCSI better," he says.
For users with legacy Fibre Channel gear, FCoE leads the way as the Ethernet choice. If they move to an Ethernet SAN, 44% chose FCoE, but 30% chose iSCSI, at a close second, and 26% chose NFS, in third.
The shift to unified fabrics is definitely underway, but it will be interesting to see how iSCSI fares as FCoE products become fully baked.
In a recent study "Benefits Of SAN/LAN Convergence," conducted by Forrester Research and commissioned by Dell, 10GbE iSCSI ranks highest among users as the protocol of choice for unified fabrics.
Forrester conducted an online survey with 213 storage professionals in the US, UK, China, and the Netherlands, and 10 in-depth interviews of the same audience. The results show that more than double the respondents selected 10GbE iSCSI (56%) versus the next closest choice, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) (27%).
The study also revealed that 66% of respondents overall said that they are very interested or moderately interested in the concept of unified fabric or SAN/LAN convergence.
The reason for the iSCSI interest is mostly due to the adoption of server virtualization technology. Forrester claims that iSCSI is growing as protocol of choice for virtual server deployments. In a Forrester Research survey from January 2009, Fibre Channel led strongly in protocol selection for virtual server connection. This time around, Fibre Channel still leads the way, but iSCSI is closer behind.
According to Forrester, the data points to strong interest in unified fabrics, as well as interest in iSCSI in 10GbE format as a viable alternative to Fibre Channel storage.
Travis Vigil, a senior manager with Dell responsible for the company's line of EqualLogic iSCSI SAN products, says iSCSI was one of the few segments of the storage market to experience year-over-year growth of approximately 25%.
"The economic situation was an accelerator for iSCSI growth as customers looked to eliminate cost and complexity from their environments. The other contributing factor to the growth of iSCSI is server virtualization as we've seen more and more customers choose iSCSI as their fabric of choice," he says. "First time server virtualization customers find iSCSI to be a cost-effective technology."
Vigil also says iSCSI 10GbE will only make iSCSI better as Ethernet becomes the basis for unified network fabrics. "Fibre Channel over Ethernet is still developing, but iSCSI is here and now. Ten Gigabit Ethernet is only going to make iSCSI better," he says.
For users with legacy Fibre Channel gear, FCoE leads the way as the Ethernet choice. If they move to an Ethernet SAN, 44% chose FCoE, but 30% chose iSCSI, at a close second, and 26% chose NFS, in third.
The shift to unified fabrics is definitely underway, but it will be interesting to see how iSCSI fares as FCoE products become fully baked.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Where are we with FCoE?
August 4, 2009 -- The Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard is fully baked, but how soon will customers deploy the technology beyond the testing phase?
The FCoE standard was finalized at the beginning of June. The FC-BB-5 working group of the T11 Technical Committee completed its work and unanimously approved a final standard for FCoE. As a result, the T11 Technical Committee plenary session approved forwarding the FC-BB-5 standard to INCITS for further processing as an ANSI standard.
According to the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), this milestone has a few implications:
1.) BB-5 Frame Format and Addressing schema are the heart and soul of FCoE
2.) Advances FCoE industry with no new spins required for FCoE silicon
3.) FCoE products in OEM qualification today are based on the completed standard
4.) Users benefit from fully baked standardized FCoE solutions from day one
Industry research firm TheInfoPro (TIP) believes FCoE is still in the very early stage of development within storage organizations at large enterprises.
In a recent paper, "Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE): Storage Pro Perspective," Rob Stevenson, TIP's managing director of storage, and Anders Lofgren, chief research officer write:
"It is clear that FCoE and server virtualization are becoming more tightly linked and end users are waiting for 10 Gigabit Ethernet to be fully deployed throughout the data center before moving forward with FCoE adoption, which we expect in two to three years."
TIP also believes FCoE adoption should start to accelerate following the implementation of 8Gbps Fibre Channel and 10 Gigabit Ethernet among storage organizations.
They continue: "All of the storage teams we speak with indicate that FCoE will be the dominant storage transport for the future, but the roles of host connectivity, FCoE initiator certification and topology management are still being debated."
The vendors are arming themselves to the teeth with FCoE-capable networking gear, most notably IBM. Big Blue beefed up its Fibre Channel, FCoE and Ethernet networking portfolio through a series of expanded OEM partnerships with Brocade, Cisco, and Juniper Networks just last month.
According to Cisco's latest data on FCoE, customers are "rapidly adopting" Cisco's FCoE-capable Nexus 5000 series switches and more than one-third of those customers are planning to implement FCoE.
Cisco claims that it "leads the FCoE market" based on shipments. The company now has more than 900 Nexus 5000 customers and has shipped more than 100,000 ports. The Nexus 5020, which is FCoE-capable, has been shipping since June of 2008.
Cisco says 35% of Nexus 5000 customers purchased systems with FCoE enabled, representing: government, information technology, healthcare, manufacturing, media, financial services, telcos, and service providers.
Brocade, another big player in the FCoE space, is taking a realistic view of the subject. In an interesting talk from Tech Day 2009, Brocade's CTO, Dave Stevens, said today's FCoE technologies are changing the landscape of the data center, but only in the first five feet of the network infrastructure. (See Brocade's video: FCoE Reality - Brocade CTO Dave Stevens from Tech Day 2009)
Stay up to date on all of the latest FCoE news by visiting our FCoE topic center page.
The FCoE standard was finalized at the beginning of June. The FC-BB-5 working group of the T11 Technical Committee completed its work and unanimously approved a final standard for FCoE. As a result, the T11 Technical Committee plenary session approved forwarding the FC-BB-5 standard to INCITS for further processing as an ANSI standard.
According to the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), this milestone has a few implications:
1.) BB-5 Frame Format and Addressing schema are the heart and soul of FCoE
2.) Advances FCoE industry with no new spins required for FCoE silicon
3.) FCoE products in OEM qualification today are based on the completed standard
4.) Users benefit from fully baked standardized FCoE solutions from day one
Industry research firm TheInfoPro (TIP) believes FCoE is still in the very early stage of development within storage organizations at large enterprises.
In a recent paper, "Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE): Storage Pro Perspective," Rob Stevenson, TIP's managing director of storage, and Anders Lofgren, chief research officer write:
"It is clear that FCoE and server virtualization are becoming more tightly linked and end users are waiting for 10 Gigabit Ethernet to be fully deployed throughout the data center before moving forward with FCoE adoption, which we expect in two to three years."
TIP also believes FCoE adoption should start to accelerate following the implementation of 8Gbps Fibre Channel and 10 Gigabit Ethernet among storage organizations.
They continue: "All of the storage teams we speak with indicate that FCoE will be the dominant storage transport for the future, but the roles of host connectivity, FCoE initiator certification and topology management are still being debated."
The vendors are arming themselves to the teeth with FCoE-capable networking gear, most notably IBM. Big Blue beefed up its Fibre Channel, FCoE and Ethernet networking portfolio through a series of expanded OEM partnerships with Brocade, Cisco, and Juniper Networks just last month.
According to Cisco's latest data on FCoE, customers are "rapidly adopting" Cisco's FCoE-capable Nexus 5000 series switches and more than one-third of those customers are planning to implement FCoE.
Cisco claims that it "leads the FCoE market" based on shipments. The company now has more than 900 Nexus 5000 customers and has shipped more than 100,000 ports. The Nexus 5020, which is FCoE-capable, has been shipping since June of 2008.
Cisco says 35% of Nexus 5000 customers purchased systems with FCoE enabled, representing: government, information technology, healthcare, manufacturing, media, financial services, telcos, and service providers.
Brocade, another big player in the FCoE space, is taking a realistic view of the subject. In an interesting talk from Tech Day 2009, Brocade's CTO, Dave Stevens, said today's FCoE technologies are changing the landscape of the data center, but only in the first five feet of the network infrastructure. (See Brocade's video: FCoE Reality - Brocade CTO Dave Stevens from Tech Day 2009)
Stay up to date on all of the latest FCoE news by visiting our FCoE topic center page.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Hype vs. reality – A Q&A with Wells Fargo's head of IT
April 24, 2009 -- I recently had an opportunity to have a conversation with Scott Dillon, head of technology infrastructure services at Wells Fargo & Co. The discussion covered a range of topics including the bank's storage priorities and needs, how he plans to extend the life of his legacy gear through storage virtualization, and his take on emerging technologies like solid-state disk (SSD) drives and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
Like many large enterprise organizations, Wells Fargo is dealing with massive amounts of storage and all of the management, migration and data protection tasks that come with it. Dillon says he has about 5PB of storage deployed in production. Storage infrastructures of that size require a pragmatic management approach. That's why the Wells Fargo IT philosophy is "standardize and optimize," while keeping clear of IT's bleeding edge.
To that end, Dillon's main goals are driving up utilization and enhancing availability and storage virtualization is the linchpin in the process.
"Virtualization is something that we are committed to and we are deploying it across our environment. It helps our cost models because it allows us to have heterogeneous [storage] providers behind virtualization devices. With virtualization, we don't have to throw out one infrastructure to bring in a new one," says Dillon. "We are big on leveraging what we already have."
He says virtualization has helped streamline a number of complex tasks, including capacity provisioning, data migration and storage tiering. He also credits storage virtualization with speeding service delivery to customers.
As for his take on vendors, Dillon would not name his storage suppliers, but he does hint at what Wells Fargo is looking for going forward.
"A lot of the large storage providers are starting to make their play into the end-to-end space. They are putting it all together, which is how we look at the big picture. We would like to see these organizations driving their products toward IEEE standards so that we don't get locked in [to any one vendor]," he says.
Dillon stresses the importance of the customer-provider relationship in his decision-making process. "The quality, availability and resiliency of a product in an industrial enterprise setting are incredibly important to us. I want the vendor engaged and I want the sales team to have as much incentive to deliver on their commitment as they do in selling me their next product. If the product is good and you deliver on your commitment you are going to sell me a lot more stuff," he says.
"What's amazing to me is how many people are just focused on the sale. I need to know they are going to be there for the long term. When times are tough it's about who is going to be there focused on your optimization and driving up utilization," Dillon says.
Dillon is also keeping on eye on several emerging storage technologies.
On SSDs: "There is a lot of initial hype. The value proposition is there. What's intriguing is reduced power consumption. But there are a lot of questions. How many times can you write to the drive? What about availability? I don't see [SSDs] as something we would deploy in production in the near future, but the promise is there and we see it."
On data de-duplication: "We have deployed some data de-duplication technologies in our environment. We are realizing some very good lift in [our de-dupe implementation]. There is a lot of promise, but the technology needs to mature."
On FCoE: "We continue to watch it very closely. We are, in general, very interested in any technology that fits with our pragmatic and customer-centric philosophy. Directionally, I think the concept of unified networking is great."
Once the aforementioned technologies mature, Dillon will weave them into his infrastructure when and if they make business sense.
"It all starts and ends with the customer experience. You can't do technology for the sake of doing technology. It has to improve the customer's experience," he says.
Like many large enterprise organizations, Wells Fargo is dealing with massive amounts of storage and all of the management, migration and data protection tasks that come with it. Dillon says he has about 5PB of storage deployed in production. Storage infrastructures of that size require a pragmatic management approach. That's why the Wells Fargo IT philosophy is "standardize and optimize," while keeping clear of IT's bleeding edge.
To that end, Dillon's main goals are driving up utilization and enhancing availability and storage virtualization is the linchpin in the process.
"Virtualization is something that we are committed to and we are deploying it across our environment. It helps our cost models because it allows us to have heterogeneous [storage] providers behind virtualization devices. With virtualization, we don't have to throw out one infrastructure to bring in a new one," says Dillon. "We are big on leveraging what we already have."
He says virtualization has helped streamline a number of complex tasks, including capacity provisioning, data migration and storage tiering. He also credits storage virtualization with speeding service delivery to customers.
As for his take on vendors, Dillon would not name his storage suppliers, but he does hint at what Wells Fargo is looking for going forward.
"A lot of the large storage providers are starting to make their play into the end-to-end space. They are putting it all together, which is how we look at the big picture. We would like to see these organizations driving their products toward IEEE standards so that we don't get locked in [to any one vendor]," he says.
Dillon stresses the importance of the customer-provider relationship in his decision-making process. "The quality, availability and resiliency of a product in an industrial enterprise setting are incredibly important to us. I want the vendor engaged and I want the sales team to have as much incentive to deliver on their commitment as they do in selling me their next product. If the product is good and you deliver on your commitment you are going to sell me a lot more stuff," he says.
"What's amazing to me is how many people are just focused on the sale. I need to know they are going to be there for the long term. When times are tough it's about who is going to be there focused on your optimization and driving up utilization," Dillon says.
Dillon is also keeping on eye on several emerging storage technologies.
On SSDs: "There is a lot of initial hype. The value proposition is there. What's intriguing is reduced power consumption. But there are a lot of questions. How many times can you write to the drive? What about availability? I don't see [SSDs] as something we would deploy in production in the near future, but the promise is there and we see it."
On data de-duplication: "We have deployed some data de-duplication technologies in our environment. We are realizing some very good lift in [our de-dupe implementation]. There is a lot of promise, but the technology needs to mature."
On FCoE: "We continue to watch it very closely. We are, in general, very interested in any technology that fits with our pragmatic and customer-centric philosophy. Directionally, I think the concept of unified networking is great."
Once the aforementioned technologies mature, Dillon will weave them into his infrastructure when and if they make business sense.
"It all starts and ends with the customer experience. You can't do technology for the sake of doing technology. It has to improve the customer's experience," he says.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Dell mulls FCoE support
After shelling out $1.4 billion to buy SAN maker EqualLogic last year, it is safe to say that Dell has a hefty stake in the success and growth of the iSCSI storage market. Given all of the recent noise in the industry around Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) being the preferred storage protocol of the future, Dell held a conference call with media and analysts this morning to offer its two cents on the topic.
What it boils down to is that Dell’s storage folks believe converged networks based on lossless Ethernet technology will float all storage boats. According to Eric Endebrock, senior manager for Dell’s storage product group, iSCSI is here to stay and Fibre Channel storage will bolster FCoE as a way to connect legacy FC systems over 10GbE networks (and eventually 100GbE networks).
"Dell is a big believer in unifying the fabric, but that is long-term," said Endebrock. "We are not looking to take our customers and forklift them away from the environments they have today, but they will soon have to start making some choices."
Dell’s official stance is that unified fabrics make the most sense financially for customers in the long-term.
"We are going to support 10GbE and Data Center Ethernet (also known as Converged Enhanced Ethernet) in our EqualLogic PS arrays. Today our PS arrays support iSCSI and will continue to support iSCSI in the future," said Endebrock. "We are not changing now, but protocol flexibility is going to be a key to our success. EqualLogic equals iSCSI is not the best way to think about our investment in that area."
In other words, the company is not ruling out support for FCoE in its Dell EqualLogic PS5000 Series iSCSI SAN arrays.
At last week’s Storage Networking World conference, I asked Dell’s director of enterprise storage, Praveen Asthana, for his take on FCoE and how it might fit into Dell’s product plans going forward.
Asthana said FCoE has already been successful in one respect. It has prompted customers to start thinking about the future. However, he maintained that FCoE requires a networking overhaul and iSCSI is still less expensive overall. He also referred to FCoE as "a stop on the way to iSCSI."
It is no surprise that Dell, like its competitors, is keeping its options open. In the end, customers will ultimately dictate which protocol will dominate or whether FCoE and iSCSI will truly coexist in converged networks.
What it boils down to is that Dell’s storage folks believe converged networks based on lossless Ethernet technology will float all storage boats. According to Eric Endebrock, senior manager for Dell’s storage product group, iSCSI is here to stay and Fibre Channel storage will bolster FCoE as a way to connect legacy FC systems over 10GbE networks (and eventually 100GbE networks).
"Dell is a big believer in unifying the fabric, but that is long-term," said Endebrock. "We are not looking to take our customers and forklift them away from the environments they have today, but they will soon have to start making some choices."
Dell’s official stance is that unified fabrics make the most sense financially for customers in the long-term.
"We are going to support 10GbE and Data Center Ethernet (also known as Converged Enhanced Ethernet) in our EqualLogic PS arrays. Today our PS arrays support iSCSI and will continue to support iSCSI in the future," said Endebrock. "We are not changing now, but protocol flexibility is going to be a key to our success. EqualLogic equals iSCSI is not the best way to think about our investment in that area."
In other words, the company is not ruling out support for FCoE in its Dell EqualLogic PS5000 Series iSCSI SAN arrays.
At last week’s Storage Networking World conference, I asked Dell’s director of enterprise storage, Praveen Asthana, for his take on FCoE and how it might fit into Dell’s product plans going forward.
Asthana said FCoE has already been successful in one respect. It has prompted customers to start thinking about the future. However, he maintained that FCoE requires a networking overhaul and iSCSI is still less expensive overall. He also referred to FCoE as "a stop on the way to iSCSI."
It is no surprise that Dell, like its competitors, is keeping its options open. In the end, customers will ultimately dictate which protocol will dominate or whether FCoE and iSCSI will truly coexist in converged networks.
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