Fibre Channel And Ethernet Conversion Is Still A Distant Dream

June 18, 2009

Vendors love to talk about a converged storage network. But a unified infrastructure with Ethernet at its core is still a distant reality.

The goal behind such an infrastructure is to both save money with less expensive Ethernet switches and achieve improved speeds with 10-gigabit Ethernet ports.

Fibre Channel Over Ethernet is being deployed only five feet into a network

Fibre Channel Over Ethernet is being deployed only five feet into a network

But data center owners don’t appear to see an immediate need to spend the money in an era of tight IT budgets. And they don’t want to give up the familiar security and manageability of fibre channel.

Fibre channel over Ethernet technology was developed as the first step toward this networking conversion by companies such as Cisco Systems and Brocade Communications Systems. But even it is proving something of a half step.

According to Dave Stevens, CTO of Brocade, it is being deployed only at the perimeter of the network and not at the core. Data traffic from a server travels on a fibre channel over Ethernet pipe for about five feet until it reaches the first network access point, where it is split back into Ethernet and fibre channel, he says.

“It is changing the landscape for the first five feet” of the network, Stevens said at a Brocade Tech Day.

Oh well, back to the drawing board! The long sought convergence may take a new generation of network managers.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Brocade Blasts Cisco’s Data Center Strategy

March 24, 2009

Inexperienced, proprietary and self-serving.

That’s how rivals describe Cisco System’s big push into the data center last week.

I think its gong to be a tough road, says Mike Klayko

"I think it's going to be a tough road," says Mike Klayko

With typical marketing aplomb, Cisco unveiled its Unified Computing System last Monday along with a promise to save customers 30 percent of their operating costs. The cost cuts come, it said, if they turned to Cisco for a broad range of their networking, storage and computing needs.

To make good on this last point, Cisco introduced its first blade servers.

Some rivals answered back almost immediately. “Would you let a plumber build your house?” asked Jim Ganthier, Hewlett-Packard’s vice president of infrastructure software and blades, according to eWeek.

On Monday, Brocade Communications Systems offered a pithy criticism of its own. And it boiled down to this: would you trust your infrastructure to unproven gear?

“I’m not sure the largest accounts in the world will put their most critical applications …on a version one product,” said Brocade CEO Mike Klayko in a video posted to You Tube. “I think it is going to be a tough road just because…they’re not a known expert in that space.”

Klayko argued that H-P, IBM and Dell are on version six and seven of their servers and that saving costs is not a secret known only to Cisco.

“We’re all going toward the same goal of taking cost out of the environment,” he said. “I just think we are better positioned.”

Of course, time will tell who is right.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

M&A Shoot Out Seen For The Datacenter

March 23, 2009

Three broad-shouldered tech titan have their sites on the datacenter.

They all have plenty of money in their pockets. And they all have plenty of desire to capitalize on the big changes coming to way corporations manage and store the tons of digital data they create.

Cisco, IBM and H-P have the datacenter in their sights

Cisco, IBM and H-P have the datacenter in their sights

So it is not hard to imagine a coming acquisitions binge as they try to out-position each other.

The heated battle went public last week when Cisco Systems announced its data center strategy and the introduced a blade server, taking it directly into the path of IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Cisco, more so, raised $4 billion in February, which analysts believe it will use for mergers and buyouts to supplement the partnerships it is forging to strengthen its product portfolio.

It may not  be alone. IBM is said to be considering an acquisition of Sun Microsystems, with its tape storage and other datacenter businesses.

Meanwhile, H-P last year acquired integration and consulting firm EDS, dramatically increasing its capabilities in corporate technology services.

So, which companies are most likely on the block? According to UBS analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos, possible candidates include Juniper Networks, Brocade Communications Systems, Netapp,, Accenture, EMC, VMware and BMC Software.

Cisco could easily be the most aggressive.

However, “we view the convergence of storage and networking in the data center as at least two years away,” says Theodosopoulos, with the recession “the lack of confidence on unified standards pushing out this market.”

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Posted by Mark Boslet

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