Can iSCSI win over FCoE's hype?

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).

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

Also Read: iSCSI sorts out performance issues

"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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Another issue with fibre channel is that it is not capable of replicating data. Today, one has to use an equipment called 'dark fibre' for data replication, which costs several crores of rupees.

Now, even if the first FCoE product is available by the end of this year, are you going to spend Rs 50 lakh and buy the 1.0 version of FCoE?

No. It's is too new a risk to take and nobody in the data center space does that. People wait for years for a technology to mature.

So, FCoE is at least two years away. However, by then iSCSI will be there in the market for about five years as a mature and tested technology with exactly the same benefits that of FCoE, whereas the other will be still ironing out bugs.

CIOL: Even iSCSI didn't live up to the hype when it was launched. Why was it so?

Harmeet: iSCSI is basically running storage data on a TCP/IP network instead of fibre channel network, ie running SCSI data over TCP/IP network. Whereas, fibre channel runs SCSI data over FCP.

However, iSCSI was initially designed as a subset of fibre channel. So people were unaware that unlike in fibre channel, multiple point connections are possible in TCP/IP Ethernet world.

The second issue was by the time iSCSI was available on 1Gigabit Ethernet, fibre channel had moved over to 2 and 4 Gigabits. Thus iSCSI was perceived as cheaper, low-end, poor performer network.

Moreover, almost everybody who was designing iSCSI storage had a very defensive premium fibre channel offering. So, obviously they tend to position fibre channel high.

CIOL: What are the factors that are pushing the adoption levels of iSCSI?

Harmeet: Factors such as Virtualisation of TCP/IP is something that fibre channel lacks.

And now with data center bridging, iSCSI can provide the same benefits that potentially fibre channel might give over a period of time.

With iSCSI, network management and administration cost can be brought down by half.

During the initial days just the storage went into iSCSI and you still had two connected drives, two SAS, or fibre channel etc. However, today, end-to-end iSCSI products are available, which also come with data deduplication, tape drive and file drive supports etc.

Thus, one can build a complete, comprehensive end-to-end disaster recovery, and bullet proof solution, which also supports data replication to another location with full redundancy.

Moreover, Ethernet is thousand times larger in terms of volume than fibre channel. This will drive the prices down in such a big way that 10 Gigabit Ethernet will be a greater attraction than 8 Gigabit Ethernet fibre channel.