Presumptuous, yes, because Ethernet has been a mainstay in enterprises since its early days over 40 years ago. It initially grew to prominence as the local area network (LAN) connection in the enterprise. More recent advances have enabled Ethernet to become a standard for mission critical storage connectivity for block, file and object storage in …Read More

We had a tremendous response to our recent Webcast “Use Cases for iSCSI and FCoE - Where Each Makes Sense.” We had a lot of questions that we didn’t have time to address, so here are answers to them all. If you think of additional questions, please feel free to comment on this blog. Q. …Read More

Why the FCoE – iSCSI Debate Continues This is my first blog post for SNIA-ESF. As a Principal Storage Architect, I have been doing extensive research on the factors that are driving FCoE vs. iSCSI choices over the last several years. The more I dive into the topic, the more intriguing the debate becomes. In …Read More

Technology continues to advance rapidly. Making sense of it all can be a challenge. At the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum, we focus on storage technologies and solutions enabled by and associated with Ethernet Networks. Last year, we modified the charters of our two Special Interest Groups (SIG) to address topics about file protocols and storage …Read More

It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride for FCoE, which started out with more promise than it was able to deliver. In theory, the benefits of a single converged LAN/SAN network are fairly easy to see. The problem was, as is often the case with new technology, that most of the theoretical benefit was …Read More

Previously, I’ve blogged about the VN2VN (virtual node to virtual node) technology coming with the new T11-FC-BB6 specification. In a nutshell, VN2VN enables an “all Ethernet” FCoE network, eliminating the requirement for an expensive Fibre Channel Forwarding (FCF) enabled switch. VN2VN dramatically lowers the barrier of entry for deploying FCoE. Host software is available to …Read More

Our VN2VN Webcast last week was extremely well received. The audience was big and highly engaged. Here is a summary of the questions attendees asked and answers from my colleague, Joe White, and me. If you missed the Webcast, it’s now available on demand. Question #1: We are an extremely large FC shop with well …Read More

“Software Defined” is a label being used to define advances in network and storage virtualization and promises to greatly improve infrastructure management and accelerate business agility. Network virtualization itself isn’t a new concept and has been around in various forms for some time (think vLANs). But, the commercialization of server virtualization seems to have paved the path …Read More

Seamus Crehan, President, Crehan Research Inc. 2H12 results 2012 turned out be another very strong growth year for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), with the data center switch market and the server-class adapter and LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM) market both growing more than 50%. Broad long-term trends such as virtualization, convergence, data center network traffic growth, cloud deployments, …Read More

The completion of a specification for FCoE (T11 FC-BB-5, 2009) held great promise for unifying storage and LAN over a unified Ethernet network, and now we are seeing the benefits. With FCoE, Fibre Channel protocol frames are encapsulated in Ethernet packets. To achieve the high reliability and “lossless” characteristics of Fibre Channel, Ethernet itself has …Read More