Omar Sultan Apr 9, 2008

Steve:

I certainly understand the challenges with this.  I do think it is worth noting if a company starts offering FUD instead of better solutions.

In most cases, it is simply a matter of education—at one time, we were new to the market, but that is certainly not the case any more in terms of market share or technology and thought leadership.

Anyway, if I can be of help, please feel free to ping me directly.

Regards,

Omar

Marcin Makarewicz Apr 10, 2008

On the subject of conversion to a Unified Fabric. I attended the IDC Data Center and Virtualization Forums this week in San Francisco, and sat in on a presentation by a FC competitor on their unified fabric vision.

While there was plenty of talk about a common fabric integrating 8G FC, 10GbE+FCoE, over Common Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), the presentation and models focused on pure strengths of FC solutions between server and storage (maybe their ppt just haven’t caught up yet).  At the end of the presentation there were many questions about this competitor’s 10GbE+FCoE capabilities, and how they see themselves fitting into a Cisco network already interconnecting the servers on the Ethernet side (...no, I didn’t ask any of those questions).  So the presenter was feeling the pressure from the audience, and it was clear that the common interface was going to become Ethernet, and that fact was making them somewhat uncomfortable. So the vision is being presented by other vendors as well, however their ability to execute towards that vision is not clear. The presenter did promise additional product launches in the coming year that would enhance their CEE offering.

Just thought I’d pass along...

Regards,
Marcin.

Omar Sultan Apr 12, 2008

Marcin:

Thanks for passing along your impressions.  Over the last couple of weeks I have read in more than once that things are consolidating on Ethernet.  The question now is the time frame—I think it will be longer than some expect.  I agree with Doug’s assessment in a previous blog post: FC will still be around in a decade.  With strong plays in Ethernet, FC, and Unified fabric, we can afford to be agnostic on this front.

Actually, from a customer perspective, I think one of the good things is that pretty much everyone is working from the same playbook—listen to all the major players and you will hear common themes around consolidation, virtualization, automation, unified fabric, etc.  This is a pleasant change from the past, where customers had to sort through multiple competing architectures and ran the risk of ending up in an evolutionary dead-end.  Sure there is competitive differentiation, but companies are, for the most part, not moving orthogonal to each other.

As you note, Marcin, a lot of it will come down to who makes the most effective transition from slideware to hardware.

Regards,

Omar