George,
I agree that the Byte article seems to ignore the Fibre Channel to Ethernet gateway product from Ancor, but this is not really a high-performance solution. I'm still waiting for Ancor's "High-Performance Fibre Channel to Ethernet Gateway" that was talked about many moons ago. I discussed this several times with Ancor, and I think I finally convinced them that they needed this product sooner, rather than later. (I'm disappointed that it has taken this long.)
What I would like to see is a small router-like box with one or more Fibre Channel ports on one side and one or more Gigabit Ethernet or a bunch of Fast Ethernet ports on the other side.
Another possibility that I brought up a long time ago is developing a module that would plug into the MKII, replacing one of the Fibre Channel cards, that would have Fast/Gigabit Ethernet capability.
So far, Ancor has had a bit of a myopic view of the Fibre Channel network. I don't believe it will be a homogenous network, consisting ONLY of Fibre Channel. I think that early installations of Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks will still require Ethernet connections to legacy hardware. With the price of switched Ethernet dropping drastically, it seems to make sense to offer this capability. That way, customers can gradually move their existing servers into the Fibre Channel SAN, rather than having to do it all at once. It can't be terribly difficult to do. The MKII already has an Ethernet port for management. <g>
Ancor's solution to date has been to put two cards in a server or workstation, and let it function as a router. (I cringe when I hear this suggestion made.) If the server crashes, the whole storage area net is down.
Craig |
