Can iSCSI win over FCoEs hype?

iSCSI

Can iSCSI win over FCoE's hype?

FCoE has lots of bugs to be ironed out

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

BANGALORE, INDIA: Fibre Channel over Ethernet networks or FCoE standard, developed by the FC-BB-5 working group of T11 in June 2009, allows fibre channel to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks while preserving fibre channel protocol (FCP).

iSCSI Evolution Chart

Internet Small Computer System Interface, an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities.

1998 – Proof-of-concept (IBM Research).
03/2000 – First draft of iSCSI standard presented at the IETF. Main author is Julian Satran,
IBM Haifa Research Lab. Original contributions from IBM and Cisco.
09/2000 – Demo at CERN and Network World+Interop.
06/2001 – GA of IP Storage 200i, first iSCSI appliance in the industry.
07/2001, 11/2001, 02/2002, 07/2002 – iSCSI Interoperability Plugfests.
08/2001 – Boot over iSCSI (iBoot) for Linux.
02/2002 – Boot over iSCSI for Windows.
08/2002 – iSCSI specification passes IP Storage Working Group last call.

Source: IBM https://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/projects/storage/iSCSI/history.html

However, is there a danger lurking around iSCSI once the most touted FCoE comes in?

Also Read: iSCSI sorts out performance issues

Harmeet S. Malhotra, enterprise solutions marketing director, Asia Pacific & Japan, Storage & Unified Fabric Solutions Marketing, Dell

"No," says Harmeet S. Malhotra, enterprise solutions marketing director, Asia Pacific & Japan, Storage & Unified Fabric Solutions Marketing, Dell. "FCoE has lots of challenges even today. In networking world, you have three switches through which traffic flows. However, with FCoE you are stuck with one switch and the moment you connect it to the second, it doesn't hop. This problem will take another year to be fixed."

He was talking to Deepa Damodaran of CIOL in an exclusive interview. Excerpts:

CIOL: What are the challenges that will prevent FCoE from gaining traction despite the huge hype?

Harmeet: The main challenge is the fact that it is still at 8 Gigabits, whereas iSCSI has moved over to 10 Gigabits.

As of now, FCoE will run an 8 Gigabit fibre channel connection on a 10 Gigabit Ethernet pipe. Moreover, except FCoE cards, no other products are available in the market today. Storage and switch vendors have just moved over with the standard last month.

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