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First and foremost, data centers in general and SANs in particular are very complex and challenging environments. The cost of an outage or even a brownout can be disastrous to a business. We have heard of complete business failures due to a significant disruption in their SAN. Given the rapid changes in technology and the shear number of products in a typical multi-vendor SAN, interoperability and stability issues can become overwhelming to manage. For this reason, SAN admins and IT professionals have good justification for being skeptical.

And that is why the word “fear” was used, perhaps inappropriately. The intent was not to position fear in the sense of “afraid to move forward without cause”, but rather, fear in the sense that there is good reason to be skeptical and to insist on proof-of-concepts and real pre-production deployments before charging ahead in a full-scale production environment.

The good news is that these proof-of-concepts and per-production deployments are happening as we speak. Many vendors in the FCoE ecosystem are actively teaming to improve the overall quality of these systems prior to the time when customers are ready for rollout. It will be these vendors’ ultimate challenge to prove to customers there should be less concern about moving ahead with FCoE.

And yes, Fibre channel will be around for a long time to come. But equally important is “that FCoE is built upon established standards” that will hopefully reduce the issues common with early technology adoption. If this advantage cannot be effectively leveraged in the SAN, then the value proposition of FCoE is simply not as compelling as the industry would hope.

The section on “Fears” completely misses the mark on why some end users are conservative about new technology. New products are always buggy. Downtime and failures can be orders of magnitude more expensive than hardware or maintenance.

Ironically, my ugliest example of this lesson was building a SAN!

The “reliable” claim isn’t credible until a product has been in the field for some time. Acknowledging this, many vendors have adopted the distinction between “General Deployment” (still not a turkey after X customers run Y hours) and “General Availability” (just passed qual).

“This type of fear is rooted in lack of familiarity” is condescending. System architects are accustomed to dealing with things they only superficially understand. “This concern is rooted in the pain suffered each and every time they adopt a new technology too early” is more accurate.

“Fears” implies the end-users aren’t rational and don’t have valid concerns. As a perspective end-user, I resent that. Would have accepted something like…

“Concerns about the problems commonly associated with early adoption… may not recognize that FCoE is built on established standards and may work on hardware they already trust.”

I don’t believe the argument that existing Fiber Channel is a “soon-to-be-legacy technology” in 2008. Again, cost of downtime and failure can be orders of magnitude higher than the hardware. SANs will still be here for years after FCoE has been established. New servers still come with PCI-X. Windows XP is still more popular than Vista.

Sure, Fiber Channel will phase out eventually – but I doubt it will happen before I could finally break even selling the condo.