FCoE is a freebie, while 802.1Qbh is extended to service providers
Two data center standards that Cisco is deeply involved with are going through some significant changes. And depending on where you sit, the changes could be good or bad.
The first is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), a standard Cisco helped define and accelerate, and is aggressively marketing. But due to market inertia, the technology’s immaturity, suitable alternatives and other factors, FCoE is fast becoming a freebie on adapters and switch ports.
Vendors who were literally banking on FCoE to help drive 10G adapter and switch volumes and incremental revenue are now finding that charging for FCoE may actually be inhibiting those volumes. They are now forced to bundle it in in order to make the 10G sale.
This is made clear by Dell’Oro’s data on the average selling price (ASP) of 10G adapters and switches, with or without FCoE. Those ASPs are virtually the same – you buy 10G with or without FCoE, you pay the same price.
Cisco says it still charges a separate software license fee for FCoE on its Nexus 5000 switch but still, FCoE pricing undermines the hyped up demand for the technology. 10G is the demand — FCoE is just along for the ride.
The other standard in flux is IEEE 802.1Qbh, which defines port extension of remote physical switches doing heavy duty processing on behalf of virtualized switches in blade servers. The bh specification was initially being defined in lockstep with 802.1Qbg, a standard for coordinating operations between virtual switches and physical ones deeper in the network.
Cisco and HP are instrumental in the definition of these standards. But HP says Cisco is essentially diverting bh by augmenting it for service provider applicability, broadening its focused scope beyond the data center.
HP is troubled by the insertion of a new Cisco-proposed tagging scheme in bh; Cisco says the new tag is and was always needed to support multicast forwarding and VLAN scalability in large multi-tenant or cloud based data centers.
HP fears bh is no longer optimized for data centers and that the new tag will be an added expense for switch and NIC vendors. Cisco says it still applies to data centers but is now extended for provider clouds, and that the change “just wasn’t that big a deal.”
That final point may depend on whether you’re an HP enterprise data center customer or a Cisco service provider customer.
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