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Brocade and Cisco squabble over future fabric standards

Clashing acronym disarray has hit the networking scene with Brocade's recent claim that vendors won't rally 'round Cisco's version of data center Ethernet. But first, let us serve as your metaphorical machete to help clear away the acronymic jungle that lies before you: Cisco and Brocade have rival visions for making their next …

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Tristan
Coat

Already extinct

I figured with 10gigE and iSCSI, fabric's days are rather limited, and any new standard will be dead before anyone actually buys any kit to use it with.

I'm grabbing my coat to jump on the iSCSI bandwagon.

Anonymous Coward
Go

iSCSI sucks

Sorry...TCPIP totally sucks as a storage transport.

Its iSCSI's days that are numbered...as soon as we have a protocol actually DESIGNED for storage IO that can take advantage of commodity 10GigE, it will be a mad dash to it.

The whole reason iSCSI is such a low-end niche player right now, and the reason why no serious operation uses anything but fibre channel is because of TCP/IP is horrid for storage.

Learn more about FCoE and you will learn why it will dominate. It will be the same costs as iSCSI and much faster and more reliable.

Greg
Dead Vulture

Except he wasn't rebutting your piece.....

he was taking my posting to task and specifically referenced my article

Credit, I did extract the initial information from your post.

Macka
Thumb Down

Infiniband?

You've got to be kidding. Infiniband over copper has a max specified distance of 20m, but Cisco only support up to 15m due to bit-error rate issues. Even over fibre it maxes out at 200m. Modern 10 GbE ToE adapters have faster latency times than Infiniband and don't suffer from the distance restrictions.

iSCSI and FCoE won't really compete much either. Which one you will use depends on what you want to achieve. FCoE will likely be faster and more reliable because it's lossless, but it doesn't use IP Layer 3 therefore it's not routable, where as iSCSI is. So for local fast storage within the confines of a single datacentre FCoE will be the protocol of choice. But for storage networks over longer distances, iSCSI is better.

I'm not swallowing the whole marketing spiel on Converged Ethernet either. Not yet at any rate. Maybe when 40 or 100 GbE products are available I'll change my mind, but only a twit would push network and storage traffic over the same copper pipe if performance were any consideration at all.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

i Still Can't Sell It

Most people in the storage industry know that iSCSI stands for i Still Can't Sell It. Okay, that is probably a bit unfair but within the big multi-petabyte storage estates; iSCSI has not got that much traction. If we do IP storage, we do it using NAS and if we do, we do it using FC.There are odd cases when we need to do block storage over distance; but it's not that common for most of us.

Most of us are pretty interested in FCoE tho'; we are all concerned tho' about the impact this could have on the market. If FCoE takes off, Cisco are going to own the data-centre network and it is going to be very hard at this time for anyone else to compete.

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