Cisco: We are NOT lagging behind Brocade A Cisco boss fired a warning shot across Brocade's bow after the rival networking biz bragged that it had a two-year lead over Cisco in the 16Gb/s Fibre Channel arena. Cisco's product manager for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), J Michel Metz, took exception to boasts made by Brocade's chief technology officer Dave Stevens …
One quick correction. I did not say that FCoE was outselling FC. I said that in Q3 in terms of switch ports, FCoE sold more than a quarter million switch ports compared to Brocade's 60k according to Crehan Research. As a whle, FC continues to sell extremely well for both companies.
I haven't seen many data center networks that I would want to deploy FCoE in to support a storage infrastructure without major upgrades/isolation domains. Don't know that I would call FCoE a product you could "deploy ... right now" in existing corporate networks. Same for 16Gb FC for that matter...
I believe this is marketing speak. Most of the new cisco switches offer selectable FCoE, FC or Ethernet capability. This makes saying that you've shipped 60M FCoE ports hollow, as the vast majority of the ports will not be used for FCoE, but rather for plain-old-ethernet.
I could be wrong, however. Mr. Metz, could you clarify how many of the 60M ports were actually used for FCoE?
Understandably, El Reg has to please its editorial staff but I was curious if there were more to this story. A google search uncovered J Metz Cisco blog on this matter. It seems El Reg cut down his reply quite a lot, but the original article and added comments are on his blog. If you are curious google search for "j metz fcoe". I would post the link, but it might be in bad form to link spam in the comments area. Anyway, it gives the whole story as it stands today so you can educate yourself as well as possible.
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