Never bet against Ethernet!
I am sure many IT experts and practitioners would agree. In the past 30 years or so, Ethernet has fought and won against many so-called would be “Ethernet killers”. The one that stood out for me was ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) because in my past job, I implemented NFS over ATM, running in LANE (LAN Emulation) mode in a NetApp filer setup in Sarawak Shell.
That was more than 10 years ago. And 10 years ago, ATM was hot technology. It was touted as the next generation network technology and supposed to unify the voice, data and network together. ATM also had better framing and QOS (Quality-of-Service) control and offers several modes of traffic shaping and policies. And today, ATM is reduced to a niche telecommunication protocol, and do not participate much in the LAN technology space.
That was the networking space. The storage networking space is dominated by Fibre Channel for almost 15 years. Fibre Channel is a serial technology that replaced the channel-based technology of SCSI in the enterprise. And Fibre Channel has also grown leaps and bounds, dominating the SAN (Storage Area Network) landscape with speeds up to 16Gbit/sec today.
When the networking world and storage networking world collided (I mean combined) with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technology some years back, one has got to give some time soon. Yup, FCoE was really hot 2 years ago, but where is it today? Is Cisco still singing about FCoE like it used to? What about the other storage vendors that used to have at least 1 FCoE slide in their product presentation?
Welcome to the world of IT hypes! FCoE benefits? Ability to carry LAN and SAN traffic with one piece of wire. 10 Gigabit-style, baby!
