March 2nd, 2009
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For FCoE to succeed in these economic conditions, it must bring down costs in the data center. Much has been said about the benefits of consolidating Fibre Channel and Ethernet networks, in particular how FCoE consolidates hardware. Rather than requiring two types of adapters for SAN and LAN – Fibre Channel HBAs and Ethernet NICs – FCoE allows SAN adapters to be collocated with LAN adapters. Such an adapter is called a Converged Network Adapter (CNA).
Converged networks integrate storage data and communication data on to the same pipeline with the FCoE technology Network management, however, doesn’t change. Thus, FCoE technology promises to reduce the cost of hardware while requiring no additional spending for new management software, an overall cost-saving solution.
Initial FCoE deployments, to the surprise of some, have not resulted in the substantial deployment and operational savings expected. One reason for this is that the CNA and FCoE switch don’t have the similar cost structure compared to their corresponding peers. These initial FCoE adapters are, in fact, more like two adapters crammed onto the same card. As such, they cost almost as much as the two adapters they are replacing.
Integration at the card level is not sufficient to reduce cost enough to entice network storage administrators to abandon the security and trust they have in their existing FC networks. Equipment developers will need to leverage integration at the chip level – such as developing a single IC that integrates both FC HBA and Ethernet NIC ASIC functionality – to achieve the savings that will attract real attention.
Another cost factor affecting FCoE technology is that FCoE is based mainly on 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The cost savings of 10GE has not been sufficient compared to 1GE to really accellerate deployment. Current efforts to further bring down the hardware cost of 10GE include higher level integration of discrete components such as LAN-On-Motherboard (LOM).
Unless FCoE and Converged Ethernet can readily demonstrate significant cost savings in data centers, it seems they will still have a long way to go.
Posted by Joy Jiang at 12:45 pm. Filed under General | Permalink
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