sfpcool (sfpcool) wrote,
sfpcool
sfpcool

value to the 10GB CNA offerings and fighting for design

TOEs provided minor (if any) performance improvements and possibly a few less percent CPU utilization, and ultimately customers used the NIC solutions and TOEs were only found embedded in storage arrays or appliances. FCoE, on the other hand, requires 10GbE which is far from universally deployed. Today, customers are either having to choose to add FCoE to a new server or purchasing adapters in after-market, so there aren’t many places where the Open-FCoE driver can just be thrown on existing equipment for ”free”. hypervisor can not remove the header from the packet to deliver FC and the virtual 10GB CNA for design switch is not lossless (see slide 17 of my 2010 EMC World presentation). VMware and Intel have been partners for a long time, so you can expect that this will be resolved some time in the future. The press release also mentioned Oracle and Dell, conspicuously absent are IBM and HP.
HP has historically been the largest sellers of FC technology, so FCoE can be seen as an opportunity to expand the storage networking market or a threat to existing revenue streams. HP participated in FCoE standards and ships a number of FCoE solutions, but sometimes delivers marketing that would push people away from FCoE. This week, HP made two announcements that show commitment to converged networking and FCoE. but HP, IBM, Oracle and Dell are also working with customers on converged infrastructure including FCoE solutions. It’s an exciting time for the small niche of storage networking, please feel free to post any questions in the comments or send me a note on Twitter.
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