Comments on: Enterprise Computing: Is 2010 The Year for iSCSI or FCoE? Place Your Bets! http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fcoe-place-your-bets/ Storage, Virtualisation & Cloud Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:09:12 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: 10Gbit 以太网 FCoE 与 iSCSI 之对决 (FCoE vs. iSCSI. vs ATAoE) : 弯曲评论 http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fcoe-place-your-bets/#comment-1180 10Gbit 以太网 FCoE 与 iSCSI 之对决 (FCoE vs. iSCSI. vs ATAoE) : 弯曲评论 Fri, 26 Nov 2010 01:27:30 +0000 http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/?p=991#comment-1180 [...] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/15/fcoe_io_kill_iscsi/ http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fco... [...] [...] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/15/fcoe_io_kill_iscsi/ http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fco... [...]

]]> By: chriscowley » Enterprise Computing: Is 2010 The Year for iSCSI or FCoE? Place Your Bets! http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fcoe-place-your-bets/#comment-1179 chriscowley » Enterprise Computing: Is 2010 The Year for iSCSI or FCoE? Place Your Bets! Thu, 25 Mar 2010 03:59:25 +0000 http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/?p=991#comment-1179 [...] iSCSI or FCoE? Place Your Bets! January 12th, 2010 chriscowley Leave a comment Go to comments This post on Storage Architect got me thinking about my own infrastructure. The time will come this year [...] [...] iSCSI or FCoE? Place Your Bets! January 12th, 2010 chriscowley Leave a comment Go to comments This post on Storage Architect got me thinking about my own infrastructure. The time will come this year [...]

]]> By: Howard Marks http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fcoe-place-your-bets/#comment-1178 Howard Marks Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:52:39 +0000 http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/?p=991#comment-1178 You've basically got why iSCSI didn't succeed in the enterprise right. Two solutions to the same problem is more expensive, even if the incremental cost of the new tech is lower and turf. I think you're underestimating the turf battles around who owns the FCoE switch. iSCSI has a longer life ahead than native FC. Organizations that now have 1-6 FC switches (as opposed to directors) and no real SAN management tools (SANscreen Etc.) are just as likely to replace that infrastructure they never really understood with 10gig iSCSI as FCoE. FCoE is a good solution for folks with hundreds of FC ports as they can keep the management processes and tools they have. A Nexus 5000 or Brocade 8000 costs 4x what a ProCurve or Foundry 10gig switch w/o FCoE does on a per port basis. That's going to matter to some especially in a downturn. All should note that both FCoE and iSCSI (10gig) have been demoed to deliver a million IOPS so performance is an issue for only a small number of users. iSCSI performance has always been better than perception. - Howard You’ve basically got why iSCSI didn’t succeed in the enterprise right. Two solutions to the same problem is more expensive, even if the incremental cost of the new tech is lower and turf. I think you’re underestimating the turf battles around who owns the FCoE switch.

iSCSI has a longer life ahead than native FC. Organizations that now have 1-6 FC switches (as opposed to directors) and no real SAN management tools (SANscreen Etc.) are just as likely to replace that infrastructure they never really understood with 10gig iSCSI as FCoE. FCoE is a good solution for folks with hundreds of FC ports as they can keep the management processes and tools they have.

A Nexus 5000 or Brocade 8000 costs 4x what a ProCurve or Foundry 10gig switch w/o FCoE does on a per port basis. That’s going to matter to some especially in a downturn.

All should note that both FCoE and iSCSI (10gig) have been demoed to deliver a million IOPS so performance is an issue for only a small number of users. iSCSI performance has always been better than perception.

– Howard

]]> By: Joe Galietto http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fcoe-place-your-bets/#comment-1177 Joe Galietto Sun, 24 Jan 2010 05:51:02 +0000 http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/?p=991#comment-1177 My opinion is that we will see iSCSI with 10GB Ethernet grow in the Small and Medium business segments. It will grow in the shops with the smallest IT staffs. I do not think we will see large scale commitments to FCoE in the first 3 quarters of this year. Firms which are using FC today and who need to refresh this year I expect to make a non-decision and go with 8GBs FC. That may change in the 4th quarter if FCoE matures sufficiently. If FCoE does not gain significant traction by Q4 it is effectively dead. But, that does not mean iSCSI is the winner in the enterprise. I think that FCoE is going to be an extremely tough sale because of internal politics at the customers storage vs network. The chorally of that is FCoE deployments are going to be beset with failures caused not by the technology by political divides at the customer. Joe My opinion is that we will see iSCSI with 10GB Ethernet grow in the Small and Medium business segments. It will grow in the shops with the smallest IT staffs. I do not think we will see large scale commitments to FCoE in the first 3 quarters of this year. Firms which are using FC today and who need to refresh this year I expect to make a non-decision and go with 8GBs FC. That may change in the 4th quarter if FCoE matures sufficiently. If FCoE does not gain significant traction by Q4 it is effectively dead. But, that does not mean iSCSI is the winner in the enterprise.

I think that FCoE is going to be an extremely tough sale because of internal politics at the customers storage vs network. The chorally of that is FCoE deployments are going to be beset with failures caused not by the technology by political divides at the customer.

Joe

]]> By: Tweets that mention The Storage Architect » Blog Archive » Enterprise Computing: Is 2010 The Year for iSCSI or FCoE? Place Your Bets! -- Topsy.com http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fcoe-place-your-bets/#comment-1176 Tweets that mention The Storage Architect » Blog Archive » Enterprise Computing: Is 2010 The Year for iSCSI or FCoE? Place Your Bets! -- Topsy.com Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:17:13 +0000 http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/?p=991#comment-1176 [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Stuart Miniman, Steve Chambers, Chris M Evans, TechHead.co.uk (Simo, Emulex and others. Emulex said: Is 2010 The Year for iSCSI or FCoE? Place Your Bets! http://bit.ly/6DWEIa /via @chrismevans #fcoe #iscsi [...] [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Stuart Miniman, Steve Chambers, Chris M Evans, TechHead.co.uk (Simo, Emulex and others. Emulex said: Is 2010 The Year for iSCSI or FCoE? Place Your Bets! http://bit.ly/6DWEIa /via @chrismevans #fcoe #iscsi [...]

]]> By: Nigel Poulton http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fcoe-place-your-bets/#comment-1175 Nigel Poulton Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:21:24 +0000 http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/?p=991#comment-1175 Chris, It will be interesting to see how iSCSI benefits from 10Gbps Ethernet. Some of the DCB extensions, in particular Priority based Flow Control (PFC), can extend lossless functionality to iSCSI - anybody for iSCSI over UDP rather than TCP. UDP might be viable on a lossless Ethernet!? CNAs are also starting to offer hardware offloads for iSCSI too. Couple that with 10Gbps and performance *might* come up to similar levels. While I'm sure FCoE will pick up pace in 2010, I wonder if 2011 might be the year of FCoE. I dont doubt the benefits FCoE promises (consolidation, fewer cables, fewer I/O adapters, switch ports...) but the relative immaturity of the protocol and the economic client might hamper deployment this year. I think a lot of people will wait until the economy recovers a little more and the protocol and shipping products mature some. As for the comment saying FCoE might kill FC. Not sure what that means.... its still FC protocol encapsulated in a jumbo Ethernet frame. Management most of the protocol specifics stay.. in fact the only thing that springs to mind that will disappear is buffer credits - replaced by PFC. Nigel Chris,

It will be interesting to see how iSCSI benefits from 10Gbps Ethernet. Some of the DCB extensions, in particular Priority based Flow Control (PFC), can extend lossless functionality to iSCSI – anybody for iSCSI over UDP rather than TCP. UDP might be viable on a lossless Ethernet!?

CNAs are also starting to offer hardware offloads for iSCSI too. Couple that with 10Gbps and performance *might* come up to similar levels.

While I’m sure FCoE will pick up pace in 2010, I wonder if 2011 might be the year of FCoE.

I dont doubt the benefits FCoE promises (consolidation, fewer cables, fewer I/O adapters, switch ports…) but the relative immaturity of the protocol and the economic client might hamper deployment this year. I think a lot of people will wait until the economy recovers a little more and the protocol and shipping products mature some.

As for the comment saying FCoE might kill FC. Not sure what that means…. its still FC protocol encapsulated in a jumbo Ethernet frame. Management most of the protocol specifics stay.. in fact the only thing that springs to mind that will disappear is buffer credits – replaced by PFC.

Nigel

]]> By: Chris Cowley http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fcoe-place-your-bets/#comment-1174 Chris Cowley Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:15:27 +0000 http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/?p=991#comment-1174 "Imagine wearing two hats and arguing with yourself all day!" Seeing as I work in Portsmouth and my main colleague works in Lincolnshire then I sometimes have to resort to that just to have a good argument! “Imagine wearing two hats and arguing with yourself all day!”

Seeing as I work in Portsmouth and my main colleague works in Lincolnshire then I sometimes have to resort to that just to have a good argument!

]]> By: Robert Winter http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fcoe-place-your-bets/#comment-1173 Robert Winter Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:11:53 +0000 http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/?p=991#comment-1173 If iSCSI has failed it has been a magnificent failure with increased shipments every year (refer to your latest industry analyst charts – any of them). The arrival of iSCSI offload and 10 Gbps Ethernet has given iSCSI the needed boost to outperform FC. When iSCSI was a 1Gbps Ethernet technology FC had an advantage with 4 Gbps media. The reason FC has gone to FCoE now is that the speed of Ethernet has outstripped FC and will continue to do so with future 40/100/400 Gbps deployments. But, and hear’s a big but, Ethernet isn’t FC and you can’t just ignore the quality of the FC physical and data link layers (FC-0/1) that provided a superior (in my opinion) flow control mechanism to Ethernet by using proactive credits and not the tried and not always true Ethernet method of reactive PAUSE frames. The new DCB (Data Center Bridging) Ethernet standards from IEEE, in particular the PFC – 802.1Qbb standard, just replicate this PAUSE mechanism 8 times, once for each priority on a link. Not sure that really helps anything. iSCSI, however, can recover from a dropped frame – it has a 25ms TCP fast-retransmit capability. FCoE doesn’t have anything like this and will incur an I/O (60 second) timeout if ANY frame is dropped. So, with FCoE you have the option of dropping frames or building in over-capacity in your networks so there’s no congestion. Also the relative (to iSCSI) immaturity of FCoE standards continues to be a concern as maturity only comes with deployment history. iSCSI has been deployed for almost a decade and is improving by continued and accelerating use. The one deficiency of iSCSI relates to its integration into Enterprise class management systems but that is due more to the fact that Ethernet itself is not fully integrated into a storage mangement context - and FCoE, by nature, has the same problem. Maybe FCoE will be there in a few years – but it’s not ready for prime time yet – despite all the hype. If iSCSI has failed it has been a magnificent failure with increased shipments every year (refer to your latest industry analyst charts – any of them). The arrival of iSCSI offload and 10 Gbps Ethernet has given iSCSI the needed boost to outperform FC. When iSCSI was a 1Gbps Ethernet technology FC had an advantage with 4 Gbps media. The reason FC has gone to FCoE now is that the speed of Ethernet has outstripped FC and will continue to do so with future 40/100/400 Gbps deployments. But, and hear’s a big but, Ethernet isn’t FC and you can’t just ignore the quality of the FC physical and data link layers (FC-0/1) that provided a superior (in my opinion) flow control mechanism to Ethernet by using proactive credits and not the tried and not always true Ethernet method of reactive PAUSE frames. The new DCB (Data Center Bridging) Ethernet standards from IEEE, in particular the PFC – 802.1Qbb standard, just replicate this PAUSE mechanism 8 times, once for each priority on a link. Not sure that really helps anything. iSCSI, however, can recover from a dropped frame – it has a 25ms TCP fast-retransmit capability. FCoE doesn’t have anything like this and will incur an I/O (60 second) timeout if ANY frame is dropped. So, with FCoE you have the option of dropping frames or building in over-capacity in your networks so there’s no congestion. Also the relative (to iSCSI) immaturity of FCoE standards continues to be a concern as maturity only comes with deployment history. iSCSI has been deployed for almost a decade and is improving by continued and accelerating use. The one deficiency of iSCSI relates to its integration into Enterprise class management systems but that is due more to the fact that Ethernet itself is not fully integrated into a storage mangement context – and FCoE, by nature, has the same problem. Maybe FCoE will be there in a few years – but it’s not ready for prime time yet – despite all the hype.

]]> By: Stuart Miniman http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fcoe-place-your-bets/#comment-1172 Stuart Miniman Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:27:59 +0000 http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/?p=991#comment-1172 Chris, Where I fully agree with you is that "hype" tends to drive perceptions too much in this space. iSCSI was originally pitches as a "FC-killer" and it has not done this. For years I spoke with the large enterprise customers in EMC's customer base and iSCSI was not something that interested the storage administrators. That being said, last year at my FCoE session, in an audience that had 100% FC adoption, there was also 1/3 of the audience that had iSCSI deployed. Yes, iSCSI is today in smaller shops (where the administrator handles the servers, network and storage) or in small pockets of the larger enterprise. FCoE fits nicely into the management paradigm of FC and therefore can move into those big configurations much easier than iSCSI. The real challenge is moving from the standalone SAN (either FC or iSCSI) into a converged environment where LAN and SAN are on a single wire. We need this for cost; while CNAs are not inexpensive, the overall Capex and Opex of the environment can be improved by moving to an environment where 100% of servers have the option for SAN attach rather than the current model where we choose whether to use network storage on a server by server basis which doesn't allow for the flexible, virtualized environment that customers are moving to. Let's not over-hype what FCoE can do TODAY - it will take a few years to work out the technical and political issues. There is also plenty of room in the marketplace for iSCSI and FCoE to flourish. Chris,
Where I fully agree with you is that “hype” tends to drive perceptions too much in this space. iSCSI was originally pitches as a “FC-killer” and it has not done this. For years I spoke with the large enterprise customers in EMC’s customer base and iSCSI was not something that interested the storage administrators. That being said, last year at my FCoE session, in an audience that had 100% FC adoption, there was also 1/3 of the audience that had iSCSI deployed. Yes, iSCSI is today in smaller shops (where the administrator handles the servers, network and storage) or in small pockets of the larger enterprise. FCoE fits nicely into the management paradigm of FC and therefore can move into those big configurations much easier than iSCSI. The real challenge is moving from the standalone SAN (either FC or iSCSI) into a converged environment where LAN and SAN are on a single wire. We need this for cost; while CNAs are not inexpensive, the overall Capex and Opex of the environment can be improved by moving to an environment where 100% of servers have the option for SAN attach rather than the current model where we choose whether to use network storage on a server by server basis which doesn’t allow for the flexible, virtualized environment that customers are moving to. Let’s not over-hype what FCoE can do TODAY – it will take a few years to work out the technical and political issues. There is also plenty of room in the marketplace for iSCSI and FCoE to flourish.

]]> By: Paul P http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/01/11/enterprise-computing-is-2010-the-year-for-iscsi-or-fcoe-place-your-bets/#comment-1171 Paul P Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:06:31 +0000 http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/?p=991#comment-1171 I'm not convinced one has to beat the other, or that they are mutually exclusive. Just as we have iSCSI and FC today. What I predict happening is FCoE replacing FC in the big end of town and iSCSI continue growing in many market segments, including the small and medium (the volume markets) - at least until 10Gb ethernet is standard in even small offices (which is surely still a while away). I would have thought FC is most at risk here not iSCSI. I’m not convinced one has to beat the other, or that they are mutually exclusive. Just as we have iSCSI and FC today.

What I predict happening is FCoE replacing FC in the big end of town and iSCSI continue growing in many market segments, including the small and medium (the volume markets) – at least until 10Gb ethernet is standard in even small offices (which is surely still a while away).

I would have thought FC is most at risk here not iSCSI.

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