* Weigh in with your views on the health of Fibre Channel
**** EDITOR’S NOTE: We have 15 copies of “The Business Case for Storage Networks” by Bill Williams, published by Cisco Press up for grabs. To enter to win a copy, answer the question below by April 1, and we’ll pick the 15 best entries. The judges are Deni Connor, author of Network World’s Storage in the Enterprise newsletter, and Linda Leung, Cisco Subnet editor. The question is: Describe your biggest problem in handling storage and why? Would it be over provisioning, over capacity, backing up and recovering files, managing files on file servers, getting your boss to buy the storage you need, or something else? E-mail your entry to Linda Leung.
Y’all may have read the last newsletter, in which Joel Snyder, senior partner at IT consultancy Opus One, proclaimed the death of Fibre Channel. The newsletter prompted a lot of response from the vendor community, including one from Rob Pegler, vice president of technology at Xiotech, which I happen to agree with.
Pegler wrote: “Interesting piece. Your ‘IT consultant’ is dead wrong, of course, but I understand why you ran the article, it is a nice controversy-generator.
“Snyder probably thinks tape is dead, too. Also, does he not understand FICON? FICON is the current mainframe interconnect of choice; it’s not going away anytime soon, and FICON is based on Fibre Channel. Remember, there is still plenty of ESCON around, too, and that is over 20 years old.
“Snyder admits there are some ‘situations’ where Fibre Channel is preferable. Hmmm. He also admits that multiple 1G-bit Ethernet adapters don’t give you a shared medium, but are suitable for ‘direct connect to small clusters.’
“Well, that’s fine for small clusters, but how about the mid-tier or enterprise? Would you rather buy a $200 Fibre Channel host bus adapter at 4Gbps or a $1,000 Ethernet network interface card at 10G-bit? Sure, you have to buy a Fibre Channel switch too, but don’t forget, you also have to buy a 10G-bit Ethernet switch.
“Fibre Chanel and Ethernet will continue to play leap-frog. The Fibre Channel roadmap extends out to 160G-bits. We will see 8G-bit Fibre Channel in 2008 and 16G-bit Fibre Channel FC in use by server host bus adapters in 2009, The T11 committee [of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards] will sometime this year ratify 20G-bit Fibre Channel for use by interswitch links (ISLs) and core switches; 20G-bit Fibre Channel links will hit the market in 2008.
“Also, the disk drive vendors are going to continue to make Fibre Channel drives well into the future; and there is no such thing as an IP disk drive. As long as the disk drive has a Fibre Channel interface, there will be Fibre Channel interconnect.
“This is not to say I am not an Ethernet/iSCSI advocate. I am. 10G-bit Ethernet is a great thing.”
If you’re interested in this debate, visit our online discussion forum and put in your two cents.
Storage in the news:
* Emulex announced SAN virtualization and management software for its Model 765 Intelligent Services Platform, which starts at under $10,000. The company also announced that LSI Logic will sell the Model 765 with StoreAge virtualization software installed.
* Seagate introduced the Momentus 5400 FDE.2, a encrypting 2.5-inch notebook PC hard drive. It is being shipped in ASI Computer Technologies laptops. The drive has 160GB of capacity, a Serial ATA interface and AES encryption.
* Cisco acquired file-area-networking vendor NeoPath Networks for an undisclosed amount.
