Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

  1. Home
  2. Data-centers
  3. Fall-fibre-channel
  4. Page
  5. The Fall of Fibre Channel: Page 4 of 16
Data Centers

The Fall of Fibre Channel: Page 4 of 16

The Fall of Fibre Channel Will it land on Brocade?
November 07, 2001

And, of course, Ethernet versus Token Ring, FDDI, FDDI II, FFOL, HIPPI,
IsoEnet, ATM, and a few others that should never have gotten off the
whiteboard.

(For more on all this, see if you can lay your hands on a copy of that
ripping historical yarn, The McGraw-Hill High-Speed LAN Handbook, by Stephen
Saunders, McGraw-Hill, 1996, available at all good garage sales and
recycling facilities near you.)

What’s interesting (I hope) about all these fights is the characteristics they share:

  • One:
      The press picks one technology and starts hyping the bejeesus out of it. The
      pack’s choice is based almost exclusively on what veeps of marketing tell
      it, though trade journalists also have a natural tendency to migrate towards
      the more recent of any two given technologies. This is because the “New
      Technology Underdog” story is a lot more interesting than the “Hey, This New
      Technology Sucks!” story, and actually takes a lot less chutzpah to write. (Note: The press can’t lose with this gambit, because, should their chosen
      technology keel over later on, they still get to write the juicy “Backlash!”

      “Where Did It All Go Wrong?” and “We Blame [name of big vendor]!” articles).

  • Two:
      Vendors line up on either side of the battlefield,
      William-Wallace-versus-Evil-English fashion, and…
  • Three:
      If there’s a standards process involved, the vendors promptly hijack it,
      putting their short-term fiscal interests over those of their users.
      Meanwhile…
  • Four:
      Market research firms forecast that the market for this new technology will
      grow to twenty gazillion-trillion-jillion dollars by next Tuesday, and…
  • Five:
      End users (poor buggers) pay way too much to wander around trade shows
      and conferences in a confused state, not being invited to the standards
      meetings, trying to work out which is the best option, and finding out that, yes, actually, sometimes people do get fired for buying
      [insert name of current or historical market-leading vendor here: IBM/Cisco/Novell/Brocade, etc.).

    So what’s missing from this five-step program? Ironically, it’s the one
    thing that can genuinely provide a clue as to which way the tech tides are
    set to flow: an examination of the business case – now, and in the future,
    for the various technology options.

    Next: Case, business, lack of

    • Tags:

    News
    Data Centers