Where is the world going ?

For the last 5 years I have been heavily involved in spreading the message of ISCSI for the enterprise. It has not been a easy stroll down the road in those 5 years. At the beginning no one knew anything about ISCSI, and only the brave on the edge of the wave dared to take it onboard.

I’m coming from a fibre-channel background, eduacating customers and sales people about it for more than 13 years, it was a big change involving my self into world of ISCSI. For a couple of years I did both technologies in sync, but was heavily focused on the ISCSI as my engagement with upcomer Equallogic grew. The demand for ISCSI has been steadily growing, but for large organizations it was not the most easy stuff to implement. When the windows ISCSI initiator was in the early stages (Ver.1.05a) it was a buggy ride, and when you combined it with e.g Adaptec ISCSI HBA’s things could be a nightmare to sort out. But it could also be the most sweet and enlightened heaven. Servers booting directly from the storage as everybody has been used to on fibre-channel. Remember to read more —>>

Today we have fibre-channel running at 8Gbit, and ISCSI running at 10GBit networks. When taken the slight overhead of ISCSI into consideration they are running at almost the same pace, not a big percentage differencing the 2 protocols. From the old days, we where always braggin’ about the solitary state of fibre-channel, and not compromising security by running all traffic on a separated network. Today we have all traffic on Iscsi running the same protocol, most installations I come across still consider the threat of intrusion on the network, and are buying switches which are physically separated from the normal network traffic.

In the first couple of years, only 2 times I had to say no to a deal on Iscsi, and direct those folks to some of the fibrechannel based products I covered. Both those solutions where video streaming networks, which almost no vendors could be cope with. Only Sun and a few other vendors could handle that load, and no one would do it on 1Gbit Iscsi network.

Today with 10Gbit converged networking making progress into the world, and 40Gbit just round the corner, the picture is completely turned. Everybody is fine with 10Gbit networking, no matter what shape they use. 10Base-T or SFP+. For the last 6 months (approx) I had no request for fibre-channel networking, but is it dead ?

No, not at all, Brocade (as one of the FC vendors) has released a roadmap stating 32Gbit fibrechannel networking within the next 3 years, 16Gbit is going into the market as we speak, and those die-hard fans of fibre-channel can survive for a few more years. But what is going to happen after that ? Companies who has recently bought new FC based equipment will hopefully have an upgrade path for 6 years or more. But the world is turning, faster and faster. 5 years ago it was not the biggest movement, but today even the largest coorperations are investing in 10 and 40Gbit ethernet  networks, creating an intelligent platform for the next many years. Converged ethnernet also means that you can run FCOE  (Fibre-channel-over-ethernet) if this is needed, and comparing to normal FC based network, we have approx the same speed, again taking the encapsulation of the FC packages into ethernet.

So what is the future ??

If you ask me by my heart I would say ISCSI, the roadmap is clear, the penetration into the datacenters is ramping up, and compared to fibre-channel, the speed of  the network is much higher when we look just a few years ahead with 100Gbit/s networking emerging from the labs.

Back to the FC fans, they do still have an upgrade path, but if they make a 5-year plan for the datacenter, they should definately consider the use of ethernet-working instead of FC.

About the author:

I’m a dane (living in Denmark), I’ve been working with storage since 1997, with Data General SAN’s which became Clarion, and then bought by EMC. Been working almost exclusively with ISCSI and Equallogic since 2005. But also worked with other vendors like SanRAD, NexSan, Fibrenetix, Qlogic, Emulex, McData, Sun, Brocade, Cisco and of course Dell.