It will take *real* software defined storage to turn that resource into real storage systems. Next comes server resident, byte writable (not flash) persistent memory. NVMe over Fabric is only the beginning…and is probably the last which will use a host stack as we know it. It will break a lot more 50 year old assumptions than we did bringing Fibre Channel to market, and will stumble in worse ways. The next era in storage will be characterized by reducing the server path length, and the latency, for access. As much as my tangential role in the initial launch of Fibre Channel leaves me hoping for its immortality, reality is that Fibre Channel is now in the “decades to fade” part of the technology life cycle. Fibre Channel earned its dominance in shared storage in the Enterprise, but did not win any design-ins in the cloud, nor in the go-back-to-using-the-storage-in-each-server pendulum swing Microsoft embarked on a decade ago. It takes a decade to establish a new technology by which servers talk to storage (and the vast majority of technologies brought to market never reach critical mass), and once one is established, even once something more fit for the role is available it takes decades for the established technology to fade. The answer, of course, to the question of Ethernet vs Fibre Channel is best considered not product by product or year by year, but as a progression over the course of decades. The unique use of a 40Gb FCoE ISL that is almost 200% faster than its closest competitor is a great example of Cisco continuing to innovate. Multiprotocol switches are a compelling alternative to their single protocol brethren and Cisco seems to be in a position to lead this product category. It’s even 47% faster than a 32Gb FC port. Even if you have no FCoE in your environment, you can use Cisco’s multi-protocol switches to connect to each other using 40 GbE FCoE port, which is 194% faster than a 16Gb FC ISL. Instead of using 16Gb FC as your interconnect, network designers can use one of these. They also announced that this is the first switch to allow you to program it using a native REST API – big news to DevOps and cloud environments.Īnother unique capability is a 40 GbE FCoE interconnect link. Fewer chassis means less wasted power, fewer things to manage, and fewer ISL links. Cisco claims to cite plenty of use cases that involve consolidating several of their competitors’ directors into a single MDS 9718 chassis. That many ports in a single chassis means you can connect far more hosts or edge switches into your core without wasting money on ISL links. The first is the MDS 9718, a director with the highest port density in the industry – 768 ports in a single chassis. Particularly vulnerable are inter-switch links (ISLs), the ports that inter-connect directors to other directors or to other switches.Ĭisco’s recent announcements are designed to meet these requirements in two ways. While 16Gbs FC and especially 32Gbs FC seems like more than enough today, it may not be in the future.
Another is to make sure that there is enough scalable bandwidth to manage the potential load that a highly dense virtual infrastructure with an all-flash storage back end requires both now and into the future. “Future proofing” is the smart move.Ī key to future proofing is to make sure the switching product has enough potential density to scale your data center into the future, also known as port density.
Make today’s protocol decision based on what you typically use in your data center, but connect it to a system that can change its mind as fast as your CIO changes theirs. Buying a switch – even an edge switch – that only supports a single protocol would seem like painting yourself into a corner. It is unclear why anyone would buy a switch that only supports Ethernet or FC because the future is simply unclear. Multi-protocol switches and ports take care of that. Gone are the days when one must decide between Ethernet and Fibre Channel (FC). While that point is debatable, there is no doubt the pressure is on.
But once Cisco got into the Fibre Channel business and started selling arms to both sides of the war, many predicted it was the beginning of the end for Brocade. Maybe there was a time when Brocade ruled Fibre Channel (and didn’t do Ethernet) and Cisco ruled Ethernet (and didn’t do Fibre Channel). In fact, what they were wrong about was whether or not a war even existed. Fibre Channel will always be faster, they said – and they were wrong. Ethernet will never completely replace Fibre Channel, they said – and they were right.