Storage equipment vendors Emulex and QLogic will ship the first 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel (FC) components for storage area networks (SANs) early next year, doubling the throughput of existing 4Gbit/s FC equipment.
The embedded 8Gbit/s I/O controllers, Mezzanine and PCI Express host bus adapters that the two firms will soon supply to manufacturers such as HP, IBM and Sun should start to appear in new servers around the middle of 2008. QLogic is also finalising SAN switches and an iSCSI-to-8Gbit/s FC router, expected to find their way into OEM partner Cisco’s products.
“Virtually every major OEM will migrate [to 8Gbit/s FC] over time. Emulex does not set end-user pricing but I would expect a price premium of about 20 per cent [over 4Gbit/s components],” said Mike Smith, Emulex executive vice president of worldwide marketing.
Just how many enterprise users either want or need 8Gbit/s bandwidth in their SANs remains uncertain. The new components will be backwards compatible with 4Gbit/s and 2Gbit/s but not 1Gbit/s FC SANs and will use the same drivers and management software.
Experts believe the trend towards server virtualisation and consolidation,
multicore CPUs, and bigger and more powerful server applications are all pushing
customers towards the deployment of faster storage I/O systems.
“Customers do not wait until perormance is up against the wall; they look to add
more headroom early on,” said Smith.
Eric Sheppard, programme manager for European storage research at analyst IDC, believes there is always demand for massive bandwidth, if only from utility and video production firms that need to move big files from one storage device to another. But he pointed out that 8Gbit/s FC is not the only high-speed storage technology on the horizon. Companies that have invested heavily in Ethernet cabling and equipment, and have little knowledge of FC technology, are looking at both 10Gbit/s Ethernet (10GbE) and InfiniBand as potential IP-based alternatives to FC.
“There is tremendous potential in 10GbE, but right now it is way too pricey. And whereas 10Gbit/s won’t ramp until mid 2009, 8Gbit/s components will be available in 2008,” said Sheppard.
A spokesman for the Fibre Channel Industry Association dismissed the threat from either 10GbE or InfiniBand. “FC enjoys more than 90 per cent of all SAN installations and still provides the path of least resistance for datacentre SAN migrations,” he said.
Leading SAN vendors including Cisco, Emulex and QLogic are also proposing new FC over Ethernet (FCoE) technology, aimed primarily at small to medium-sized enterprises that want to mix both FC and Ethernet-based SANs in the same converged network.
“A lot of people like the idea of using SANs and the FC protocol, but want to use their legacy Ethernet systems as well,” said Smith.
