1. DCOE is not essential for datacenter convergence. Datacenters can take a leaf out of the ATCA book where FC and Ethernet are more or less interchangeable across the fabric.

2. It is wonderful to quote switch per-port numbers, however they do not include adapter costs. 1G and for high end server 10G costs are 0 as these are included on the motherboard. Infiniband is not and the cost is nearly double that the cost of the switch port.

3. The reality is that enterprises continue not to grok IP. As a result Ethernet continues to be their technology of choice for long-range connectivity. While Ethernet has always lagged behind Infiniband in terms of performance this is what enables it to win in terms of market share. With Ethernet it does not matter if you are connecting a server in a rack to another server in the same rack or to a server on the other side of London.

While delayed about a year, I think later generations of x58 were planned to have 10GbE included. Infiniband keeps losing because its not mass market. Its only a matter of time before we are are blessed with 10GbE on our motherboards.

I also have hopes with IBM's advancements in cheap optical technology we'll see an eventual optical PCIe @ 40gb or 100gb interconnect that will branch into home networks. I really want to be able to buy a high end PC, and natively interconnect it with a BIOS level hypervisor creating a single resource pool. This would also effect GPU arrays.