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 Fibre Channel over Ethernet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fibre Channel over Ethernet. Show all posts
Friday, March 19, 2010
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, 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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