|
FCoE: still to connect
While billed as a panacea for all storage connectivity needs,
FCoE is still a few years away from achieving it’s much talked about benefits
as a host of issues from costs to standards dog it. By Venkatesh Ganesh
 Recently,
one of India's top five IT/ITES companies had its sights set on consolidating
its IT storage infrastructure. The company that had invested in SAN over five
years back was looking at FCoE since a consolidated architecture seemed to be
a natural fit for its needs. However, after evaluating a few proposals and keeping
in mind the issues in moving to FCoE, the CIO decided to wait and watch.
To understand the reason for this CIO's hesitancy one needs
to take a look at storage connectivity over the years. When SAN was first propagated
as a technology that could address all the pain points of enterprise storage,
there was only one protocol namely Fiber Channel. Then came iSCSI, cheaper but
seen as less scalable than FC. FCoE was born to marry the best bits of FC and
iSCSI. FCoE enables FC to use 10GbE (or faster) Ethernet networks.
The storage hardware industry is expected to grow in the
range of 12-16% in 2011, according to vendors. After a tough couple of years,
which even saw shrinkage in 2009, there is optimism this year. Globally, according
to Dell’Oro Group, the number of 10 GbE ports is slated to reach 15.1 million
and revenue will grow to $5.1 billion in 2012.
Not quite convincing
FCoE held (and still holds) considerable promise. When it
first came to the market, it was intended to take FC out of the reckoning but
it hasn’t lived up to expectations and is still finding its feet. A decade
back, when Indian enterprises started architecting their storage strategy they
kept it simple and went with either SAN or iSCSI depending upon their needs.
However, from mid-2000 onwards, as IP started becoming the de facto standard
for networking and thereby even for networked storage, companies were struck
with investments in older infrastructure (like switches) that were incompatible
with IP. Further, this siloed environment increased complexity at a time when
mobility was on the rise. “We see some existing customers upgrading to
a unified connect architecture during their tech refresh cycles,” said
Rajesh Awasthi, Director - Telecom and Cloud Service Provider, NetApp India.
 "iSCSI
is being considered and used in both mid-range and enterprise storage equipment."
Rajesh Janey
President,
EMC India & SAARC |
FCoE is typically deployed in a 'top-of-the-rack' configuration,
which means there is an FCoE-enabled switch sitting on the top instead of an
FC switch and an Ethernet switch. This switch would then send the Ethernet traffic
to the LAN and the FC traffic to the SAN. “Despite starting off slowly
and being used mostly in low-end storage, iSCSI is being considered and used
in both mid-range and enterprise storage equipment,” said Rajesh Janey,
President – EMC India and SAARC.
 "Firms
that have been early adopters of FCoE in parts of their data centers have
benefited considerably."
Mahesh Gupta
VP - Borderless Networks,
Cisco India & SAARC |
When a new data center is designed from the ground up, companies
are showing some interest in FCoE as the cost savings from cabling coupled with
investments in fewer devices (and managing the same) makes it attractive. Having
said that, a company has to rearchitect its existing data center in order to
accommodate FCoE, something that companies are loathe to do in the backdrop
of the economic slowdown and business volatility. “The question to be asked
by data center managers is not whether they should network their storage but
which applications justify their investments,” said Mahesh Gupta VP - Borderless
Networks, Cisco India and SAARC.
FCoE's benefits have yet to translate into large scale adoption in the Indian
enterprise. The IT industry has long sought out a consolidated I/O architecture
that unifies multiple data center transport technologies. By combining multiple
types of data traffic, end users stand to realize benefits including reduced
management complexity, reduction in capital and operating costs, reduced deployment
time and low power utilization, all of which are music to the CIO's ears. FCoE
would give customers a new choice for more pervasive server connectivity in
the data center and it would complement the connectivity and protocols used
in storage and data center networking today. “We are faced with challenges
of managing two different types of networks (FC SAN and Ethernet LAN traffic)
with multiple cables, devices, adapters and switches. Further, as virtualization
spreads, eventually our servers and storage would have FCoE capabilities,”
said HS Bhaskar, Country Manager, Spirent Communications.
An advantage of the technology is that companies no longer have to manage multiple
cables, switches, FC Host Bus Adapters (HBA) and Network Interface Cards (NICs).
“Firms that have been early adopters of FCoE in parts of their data centers
have benefited a lot from it,” said Gupta.
Many companies are testing FCoE on the storage and server side before trying
it out for critical applications such as DR. Most analysts advice companies
to consider this technology for a long-term period, new data center build outs
and when procuring new storage hardware.
Also, Converged Network Adapters (CNA) is expensive in the event of a company
wanting to adopt FCoE. All this is reflective of the fact that India Inc. has
not adopted FCoE in a significant way in 2011. It is learnt that some co-operative
banks have dabbled in end-of-row switching architecture in order to cut cabling
costs.
This also begs the question as to whether this technology is solely used for
fresh setups as ripping and replacing existing infrastructure costs time and
money.
Enterprises using FCoE are those which already have a sizable investment in
FC SAN. “For these, FCoE is supposed to offer a migration path for converging
previously separate storage and data networks onto a single Ethernet-based infrastructure,”
opined Network Test’s Founder, David Newman.
In India, there is a huge market for fresh setups where the bulk of companies
have not even considered FC. “The reason goes beyond technology. Currently,
not many system integrators are available to offer a migration path for companies
wanting to go from a legacy to a converged network,” said Kuppuswamy, Prabu,
Technical Development Manager, Spirent Communications. Fresh data center build
outs would however be based on a converged network.
Impact of 10GbE on FCoE
According to Crehan Research, 10GbE connectivity will have a CAGR above 70%
over the next five years, with 10GbE connections surpassing 1GbE connections
by 2013 globally. This started a couple of years back when Dell’Oro Group,
said out that the second half of 2009 saw a surge in 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) adoptions
globally.
“Running FCoE on 10GbE interface is more efficient and offers better I/O
throughput. There are many CNA venders have come up with 10G Base-T Gen2 CNA
adapter which will facilitate seamless and cost-effective deployment for FCoE
migration and, on the other hand, NEM’s are offering cost-effective FCoE
aware switches,” explained Prabu.
The technology pace with Ethernet is much faster in comparison
to the Fiber channel. “With Ethernet, we talk of 10GbE today and moving
towards 40 or 100 GbE. However FC is today at 4 or 8 Gbps moving towards 12
Gbps,” said NetApp’s Awasthi. The question that needs to be asked
is, who stands to benefit the most from 10GbE and what does the combo of 10GbE
and FCoE mean for established storage protocols like iSCSI and NAS? This also
has to do with vendors pushing for the relevant technologies. For example, Dell
and NetApp strongly believe that iSCSI and NAS will continue to play a significant
role in storage whereas Cisco feels FCoE could play a strong role as data centers
move to 10GbE. At the same time it is interesting to note that NetApp was the
first storage vendor to support native FCoE storage. “The FCoE market is
in nascent stage and it is mostly in the whiteboarding stage. While Dell Compellent
storage solutions have FCOE built in, we feel that it will take at least a year
before enterprise customers start adopting it,” said S Sridhar, Director
Marketing - India Relationship, Dell India.
 "There
remain significant growth opportunities in iSCSI, especially as more companies
turn to virtualization."
Tim Griffin
Global VP - Services & Solutions (Consumer & SMB), Dell |
Dell feels strongly that its acquisition of Equallogic was
centered strong around its belief that there is still a lot of growth in the
iSCSI market. “There remain significant growth opportunities in iSCSI,
especially as more companies turn to virtualization,” said Tim Griffin,
Global VP - Services and Solutions (Consumer and SMB), Dell. Also, during the
last decade, vendors have learned a lot about how to optimize the implementation
of the protocol on both the host and target sides. FCoE, on the other hand,
is a relatively new protocol with far fewer years of optimization behind it.
A lot of those customers don't have FC infrastructure and iSCSI offers an easy
way to get the benefits of consolidated storage without having to invest in
costly equipment or staff with the necessary skill sets.
Data center players were bullish about FCoE but felt that
some issues still need to be ironed out. “While unified connect makes a
strong case, the real challenge would come as enterprises look to migrate from
existing 10GbE to 40 or 100 GbE,” said Gupta. Tulip Telecom, which is building
the third largest data center in the world, felt that whether it was FCoE or
iSCSI, it is all about meeting the SLAs. Some industry watchers felt strongly
that the introduction of 10GbE would boost the uptake of iSCSI. Also, iSCSi
seems to be in a sweet spot as it can run on 1GbE, something that is not possible
with FCoE.
FCoE needs to iron out some technicalities and the standard still needs ratification.
“Scalability when moving above 10GbE coupled with the single-hop technology
that it runs on at present need to be addressed for large scale adoption,”
said Harjyot Singh Soni, CTO, Tulip Telecom.
Others opined that FCoE in a single vendor environment was compelling in today's
scenario. “FCoE across a multi-vendor environment with many brands has
a long way to go before it is a graceful technology,” said Tam Dell'Oro,
Founder and President, Dell'Oro Group.
The way ahead
The game changer in FCoE could be Intel. The company is going all out on 10
GbE and is making some aggressive investments into converged networking. Intel
is banking on the fact that FCoE can be run only with the right NIC. However,
with its open FCoE, any NIC can choose to run FCoE.
This opens up fresh possibilities. Storage connectivity used to be fairly simple
with clear demarcations. However, interoperability between different storage
connectivity protocols within converged devices is increasing complexity. Focus
on protocol interoperability and convergence would show the way for customers
who want to test the waters with new connectivity options. Looking at the current
state of products in the market, it can be safely said that this is a manufacturer-led
strategy that is designed to move the market towards Ethernet as the primary
storage networking technology of the future. Ultimately, lower cost, higher
performance and flexibility of Ethernet-based technologies could define its
journey going ahead.
venkatesh.ganesh@expressindia.com
|
