Congratulations or something to NetApp for being first to announce FCoE Support in their array line, press release here. It's a bit vague at the moment, I guess I'll have to make time to listen to the pod-cast.
I'm fairly optimistic about FCoE and I think that the take-up may be quicker than some people are expecting. Why? I think it might fall nicely in alot of people's refresh cycles.
10 GbE is still expensive on a per network port basis when compared to FC; well it is with the deals we've done with our suppliers and iSCSI over 1 GbE does not really cut it. I think the timing for FCoE will be just about right.
EDIT: wonder IBM will put FCoE into SVC? That's a kind of a logical thing for them to do I guess, certainly FCoE to the hosts and traditional FC to the arrays.
Personally i’m excited about FCoE … imagine, only two cables into each server. I guess its only two that the data centre people can get wrong now 😉
Good question on the FCoE in SVC. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.
At some point, I’ll have to sit down with you and a good supply of beverage and understand what you see in this whole external storage virtualization thing.
Is it about arbitrage with various vendor licensing schemes? Or technically advantaged in some regard?
And — the big question — how does this change in a fully virtualized environment?
🙂
Chuck, happy to sit down and discuss what it is with external virtualisation and the problems it fixes for the storage mananger in a large enterprise. Some of it is purely down to the philosophical debate of monolithic versus modular but some is more based in reality and the things I would like to be able to do quicker and easier.
So next time you’re in the UK for more than a fleeting visit; we can chew the fat about storage, virtualisation and other rivetting topics.
And I’ll ask Barry about FCoE and SVC if I see him today.