SAN gang at Nimble jump in Fibre Channel pool, but how big will the splash be? Becoming a little nimbler in the SAN market, Nimble Storage is adding Fibre Channel support to its CS-series hybrid flash/disk arrays. Up until now these products have supported block data access over iSCSI only. Adding Fibre Channel will, the company believes, triple its addressable market. The product range was refreshed in …
Wish it was more widely adopted. Just having it as a dedicated, separate network, totally independent of the "network" is what's needed in a highly available VM environment. Granted, a well designed Ethernet network with full redundancy and QoS can come close for a LOT less, but if you can afford it then FC all the way.
Re: cost of FC. A common misconception. If you price out a properly-architected 10Gb Ethernet environment to support storage traffic and compare against an equivalent FC network, you will find the FC network will come out less expensive 9 times out of 10. Proper competition is a wonderful thing . . .
FC network will come out more expensive 9 times out of 10, unless you're buying Cisco switches for your Ethernet data network.
If you're buying merchant silicon 10GbE switches (eg Arista, Dell) they are non- blocking, highly capable and a fraction of the cost of FC equivalents.
Additionally, we're not just talking acquisition cost. TCO across a 5 year period is also lower.
Why would any self respecting virtualization guy do this to themselves?
FC for physical Oracle DBs ... yes. But for virtualization * deployments ... that's crazy.
Imagine the testing they will need to do to keep their FC customers happy (unless Cisco is going to buy them and keep everything in the family with MDS and UCS/Nexus).
They should look at hyper convergence if they want to expand their TAM, not perpetuating legacy storage technology for virtualized environments. Using flash as a read cache and an elegant scale out log structured file system has its merits in a hyper converged environment.
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