Which in your view will succeed, in order over time, between FCIP, iFCP and iSCSI and why?
Good question. We will see all three protocols used initially, but I think that over time you will see FCIP fall out of favor. FCIP is just FC tunneling and it perpetuates a lot of the problems associated with large or extended Fibre Channel fabrics. The more FCIP products deployed, the more these issues will surface and customers will look at alternatives. The iFCP protocol was developed precisely to overcome issues that have been identified with native FC extension and FCIP tunneling. So I think iFCP will endure as long as there are Fibre Channel products on the customers’ books. Customers will want to preserve the investment they have made in their large EMC, HDS, IBM or Compaq storage arrays that use Fibre Channel interfaces. iFCP is the best way to bring those devices into an IP SAN, while still providing a migration path to iSCSI. iSCSI may gradually displace Fibre Channel, both as a transport protocol and as an interface for storage devices. The iSCSI specification, however, doe
