* NWW Buyer's Guide can help pinpoint Fibre Channel and iSCSI options
In her recent Q&A session with IT consultant and Network World tester Joel Snyder, Senior Editor Deni Connor questioned Snyder’s rationale for making the declaration that Fibre Channel technology is effectively a dead-end in the wake of the lower cost iSCSI connectivity combined with dropping 10G Ethernet prices.
“Fibre Channel is like Token Ring or H.323. Those who want to sell it just refuse to accept [that it’s dead], but the sales of iSCSI by people who ‘get it’ will skyrocket, while Fibre Channel will slowly decay away,” said Snyder during the interview.
“In two years, people will say ‘Yeah, of course, it was obvious.’ For now, I’m sure people will get all excited about it. The only reason people will still be buying Fibre Channel is because there are still a lot of Fibre Channel devices in the pipeline. The nail in the coffin was 10G-bit Ethernet.”
Connor, as well as several readers participating in an online forum, took Snyder to task arguing that technical, performance and legacy deployment issues will necessitate Fibre Channel surviving in the storage world for the foreseeable future.
In the Network World Storage Buyer’s guide, we have compiled details on hundreds of products in more than a dozen product categories, most of which have to exist in a combined Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage world. Use our recently rebuilt user interface to compare and contract the storage networking products that will suit your environment best.
