Hang on. Don't we already have enough Fibre Channel speeds? After all, 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel is starting to show up on show floors, and vendors maintain it will start hitting serious procurement lists by the end of this year (see 4-Gig for Show). And what about 10-Gbit/s Fibre Channel, not to mention InfiniBand?
Jones says 10-Gbit/s Fibre Channel equipment is still expensive to build, and, due to its encoding scheme, not backward-compatible with 1-, 2-, and 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel kit. An 8-Gbit/s spec, however, would double the speed of 4-Gbit/s while sharing the same encoding with lower-speed gear, ensuring automatic compatibility -- and lower development costs than 10-Gbit/s.
As for InfiniBand, Jones says it's not selling as a SAN solution anyway. "I suppose this could be just one more reason not to do InfiniBand," he quips.
Not everyone agrees. While 14 of the 21 principal FCIA vendors polled on the issue of 8-Gbit/s voted "yes" to the recent interconnect roadmap, Jones says one voted "no," two abstained, and four didn't vote.
The ballots were closed, but principal members of FCIA whose endorsements weren't mentioned by Jones or listed in the FCIA public statement about 8-Gbit/s interconnect include Agere Systems Inc. (NYSE: AGR.A), Broadcom Corp. (Nasdaq: BRCM), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW).
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