Brocade probably made the biggest news, announcing their 8000 converged FCoE/FC/CEE switch, which has 24 10-Gig Ethernet and eight 8-Gig FC ports along with single- and dual-port CNAs. Frankly, there were no surprises here except perhaps that the new switch is completely managed by Brocade's Data Center Fabric Manager, where the Cisco Nexus 5000 I used in the FCoE hands-on lab had a GUI for the FC side but the Ethernet side had to be managed from the command line using good old IOS commands.
QLogic and Emulex quickly responded with emails to the press and the rest of the chattering class that Brocade was "extremely late to market," had no real HBA design wins, used too many chips, used too much power, and generally smelled bad. (OK, smelled bad was mine.)
It escapes me how the second player in the FCoE switch market and the third in the CNA market can be extremely late especially as I'd be really surprised if Emulex and QLogic combined had sold (not lent or given away) 1,000 CNAs between them.
I shared a set of equipment with a Brocade user for the FCoE hands-on lab, and she complained about the Cisco switch's UI, or lack thereof for the Ethernet side, several times. I expect those organizations with Emulex HBAs and Cisco switches for FC will use the same for FCoE and those with QLogic HBAs and Brocade will do the same. The JNI/McData/Gadzooks crowd is however up for grabs.
Next time, the SNW wrap up with flash, de-dupe, and other cool news.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
