It will take products that activate all of these advantages to achieve the final shove binward for Fibre Channel. The move to 10-Gbit/s Ethernet will be key. And according to the December report from
Byte and Switch Insider, this publication's subscription research service, other protocols are likely to help, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)'s Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP) and the Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) protocol.
As these technologies gain ascendance, Fibre Channel will enter a downward spiral.
"Not so!" I hear the chorus of FC proponents scream. ISCSI, they say, may be cheaper, run farther, and be easier to manage than Fibre Channel. But Fibre Channel is entrenched. No one wants to rip out what's working. No one wants to forego any discounts or support from leading vendors.
So iSCSI, they say, will be used to complement Fibre Channel, not displace it. It will be added here and there in new installations, or wherever it can be slotted in to work without disrupting the FC SAN.
No one's saying a move to all-IP storage networking will happen overnight. It will take a long time to evolve but perhaps not as long as some folk think. Unlike the world of telecom, where many years' worth of infrastructure must be normalized and/or replaced as IP-based networks are introduced, Fibre Channel SANs haven't been around for fifty years, and they're not regulated by governments.
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