Is FCoE Our Savior Or Another Empty Promise?

By Mike Workman, Chairman and CEO, Pillar Data Systems

If you have a clean sheet of paper, do you design two or three different networks to connect your gear or do you just change the protocols and layers on a single network as the applications demand? Of course you design one physical network and layer the protocols to accomplish the networking task at hand. The bad news: it wasn't done that way. (The parallels between standard storage products and Pillar Axiom are almost too strong to ignore, but in the interest of leaving the Axiom plug out of this, I will stick to networking. You can thank me later.)

Instead of one, we have multiple networks. We have the two "biggies" namely Ethernet and Fibre Channel. They are physically different, and operate at slightly different speeds. Ethernet, the more popular of the two, has probably over a half billion port install base. To say this garners the power of volume is an understatement. Because of the layering of functionality, Ethernet equipment ranges from $39 hubs to $539,000 big-iron switches. Nice. Everyone loves it because you plug stuff into Ethernet and it just works.