With 10 Gigabit Ethernet coming and boosts in server and storage processing power, do you really need FCoE at all?
It depends on your environment and your market. Sure, 10 Gigabit Ethernet exists today. The prices for the adapters have come down dramatically. You can now get a 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter with optics — that’s the transceivers — maybe with cable, for around $1,000 to $1,200. That’s the price you would normally pay for Fibre Channel adapters. Those prices continue to come down. So why is FCoE needed in different markets? If you go downmarket into an SMB space, it’s blurred as to whether the need is for 10 Gigabit Ethernet with iSCSI or 10 Gigabit Ethernet with NAS, versus, say, 4 Gbit or 8 Gbit, let alone FCoE. Going forward, part of that question gets resolved in that a single adapter gets put into the server. That single adapter is an enhanced Ethernet adapter that has the ability to run both Fibre Channel stacks for talking to storage, as well as Ethernet-based stacks for supporting things like TCP/IP for iSCSI, for NFS, for CIFS, for HTTP, as well as other activities, all on one
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