"Switches: To us this seems like the most natural solution, although it will be at least 18 months before we expect to see switches that are robust enough to effectively manage a SAN (EMCs Connectrix comes the closest). If a switch was beefed up by adding various software and hardwaare features and functions, we believe a switch would be a very efficient SAN manager."
I, and others, disagree with this statement for the following reason: a switch, whether director-class or otherwise, SHOULD be devoted to one thing, and one thing only, and that's switching traffic between ports. Anything that subtracts cycles from that is not good.
Now, if we get to the point that Ethernet is at now and we have programmable ASICs that allow for policy to be implemented at the frame level, *AND* we have cycles left over to do policy on a per-port basis, then we can offload management to a switch.
It took 3Com, Nortel, and Cisco a long time to get to the point they are at now with programmable ASICs. What is exciting to me is how much of that knowledge can be ported to a FC environment. And who's going to do it.
Upon previewing, it appears to me that I have stated exactly what you said to begin with..."IF we can beef up the switch." |
