Steve D., says....
ARTICLE POSTED January 28th, 2002
Red-hot Fibre Channel trends for 2002
By Steve Duplessie
Here's a big-money prediction for you – the Fibre Channel market will grow this year. Why and how? Read on.
The market grows upstream
Brocade will start shipping its long-awaited 12000 product. Contrary to all mass-market concepts, the 12000 is an expensive, not-for-the meek product. It will offer unprecedented levels of density, availability and intelligence for a Brocade product, and it will be more expensive per port than the company's standard offerings.
The existing market of Fibre Channel SAN users is moving toward a further consolidation play, which bodes well for the director-class switch players, at which the 12000 is clearly aimed.
McData and InRange should also continue to reap the rewards of the upscale migration. This sector of the market will actually slow down in terms of units sold, but it will dramatically increase in the area of price per switch unit. This strategy obviously demands increased value and cost per port. I view this as following the easy money – bringing the customer you already have to the next level. It doesn't really account for the fence sitters who have yet to buy into the Fibre Channel story.
The mass market widens
Qlogic has figured out that in order to create a mass market, you need to commoditize. While Brocade is moving upstream, Qlogic is charging ahead on the commodity curve. The company just recently introduced a sub-$10,000 SAN Starter Kit package that includes a switch and 4 HBAs, along with all required cabling.
This promotion is designed to push fence sitters over to the Fibre Channel camp, and it's a smart move. The price tag and simplification obliterate the primary concerns about implementing a Fibre Channel SAN, and this should lead to more companies doing it. Vixel and Gadzoox will have to come up with new models in order to compete effectively here because Qlogic will continue to drive down the cost curve by putting switches and switch chips into everything it can.
The new-breed God-switches
These are the multi-protocol, high-intelligence switches that you will be hearing about this year. Pirus, Rhapsody, SANera, Maranti, Confluence and others will be showing us big switches with lots of Fibre Channel, Ethernet and Infiniband ports. These switches are designed to put a ton of smarts in the switch itself, often right in each individual port.
Making these "cloud" boxes smart means we don't need additional boxes like stand-alone in-band virtualization systems or super-smart disk arrays. When people like me say, "Intelligence is moving to the cloud," this is what we mean. Since Fibre Channel is the block network transport of choice for the big data centers so far, this functionality should be an enabler that adds to the market.
A little known benefit – IP
SANcastle is lumped together with the 487 other smaller convergence switch players that are fighting to tie geographically remote SAN islands together. What separates SANcastle from the pack is something that the Fibre Channel guys ought to be bragging about: A SANcastle box can effectively offload server TCP/IP (a hot topic today!) in a Fibre Channel environment.
If a user has a Fibre Channel SAN, all the servers in that SAN are also attached to Ethernet. Inter-node communication and server-to-client communication both cause the dreaded pig known as TCP to rear its ugly head. By sticking a relatively cheap SANcastle box in the middle, users can offload the TCP processing down to the Fibre Channel HBA and effectively eliminate 80%-plus of the cycles that server required for TCP.
This scenario directly translates to better application and server performance and can dramatically reduce Ethernet network traffic and congestion. No one seems to know about this, but anyone running a Fibre SAN today will benefit so dramatically, it will be impossible to not justify the minor expense.
The real beauty is that nothing else in the environment needs to change – it just makes the whole darned thing work better. Since no one sold TCP performance as a benefit when they justified their Fibre Channel purchase, this is all gravy.
Steve Duplessie is a senior analyst at the Enterprise Storage Group in Milford, MA. |
