Cisco wants to see 10G Ethernet become the one and only I/O connection between servers and the network, does it? And it would prefer if all connections would be boiled down to a single link, if possible. Setting aside the obvious problem with that -- a single point of failure -- this idea seems geared to offer an upgrade path away from Fibre Channel, allowing users to keep their Fibre Channel traffic by encapsulating it in Ethernet, i.e. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
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SPOF? no way. Cisco's idea? no way either. Anytime soon? nope.
The idea of a single link (consolidating I/O and storage) being a single point of failure doesn't stand up. You can very well have redundant 10GE uplinks just as much as today you can have redundant GE for I/O and redundant FC for storage. The point is to gradually remove FC from the picture.
This "unified fabric" idea makes a lot of sense, and Cisco was not the first to promote it. The main difference is that they are the only vendor that dares to claim it is ready now when it won't be before end of 2009. FCoE is not even close to be finalized. We'd need the "lossless ethernet" technology to be ready for this to happen. And today this is just a group of drafts with lots of open points to discuss. So others have been some time promoting it based on iSCSI for storage (which is ready and shipping) instead of FCoE.
I find it surprising to read in the press that Cisco people say they have a shipping FCoE product when the technology is not close to be ready. Maybe the Nexus line will have FCoE in the future but today it's just a big ethernet switch, and compared with others as just that, it lacks throughput, stability (new operating system) and features.
My 0.02...
Closer than you think
Fernando:
I think it is important to differentiate the technology from the standard.
I refer you to Deepak Munjal's recent post on where things currently stand in terms of vendor support and interoperability.
Finally, Paul Brown, VP of Integration and Interoperability for EMC has stated “Today EMC is working with Cisco to qualify the Cisco Nexus 5000 in our E-Lab in order to provide customers with a complete unified fabric solution, targeting customer deployments in 2H CY2008.”
Omar Sultan
Cisco Systems
Single transport, not single wire
Your reading of "single connection" might have been a little too literal. :) The idea is to collapse the data center network into a single transport capable of supporting LAN, storage and cluster traffic. From a physical perspective, Cisco still recommends dual uplinks for redundancy.
Omar Sultan
Cisco
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