Cisco either has some very dumb customers, some very rich customers or a marketing department that thinks that they can pull this off.

Perhaps they have all three, but when I compare this to HP and Dell blades, I don't think it's a realistic option, even if they plan to discount in a similar manner to the way they move switches.

And regarding Cisco switching network, with Juniper, Brocade/Foundry and Extreme as enterprise-class options, I'm beginning to think that Cisco may have taken their eyes off their core business, thus leaving it vulnerable.

"I'll take a stab at comparing California to other blade alternatives once I gather up some more information"

careful to compare apples with apples when you do. although I expect Cisco will not be a budget option, it's worth remembering the "end to end" "unified fabric" which will "significantly enhance" virtualization technology.

yup, loads of quote marks, but the vision is a good one. If you have the right kind of infrastructure this could well be a big enough reason to pay them their ransom. FCoE to the virtual machine could be very useful, as could reducing complexity of your infrastructure. I recently implemented a solution with no less than 6 switches (2x24port Gig eth and 2x20 port FC) for a 4 server solution. I suspect this Cisco kit can reduce that count enough to make it worthwhile. Even if it's expensive, I won't need to explain the 18 empty ports on every switch to a customer :)

Paris? just wishing for a simpler time where switches were switches, and blades were laptops without screens.

FCoE and CEE is nothing more than a pipe dream, given the lack of multi-hop support. All it really does is replace two commodity parts with an expensive commodity part. No thanks, but that's not even close to making sense for anyone.

Why did you think you needed 6 switches for 4 servers? I've got some really sweet bags of dirt you could probably use too. If you can't see the forest for the trees, you should find a different line of work. Surely, you're joking.

Mines the one with $$$$$$$$ on the back...

After all -- cisco got away with actually initially shipping FC switches that did not even guarantee packets were delivered in order. Mgmt likes cisco and microsoft --- The current "no-brainer" choices for MBAs.

One of the gents on another forum I frequent is a teacher in California; he was told last week there is to be a *minimum* 10% pay cut, no more money to their state-mandated pension, healthcare for their retired staff to stop, cap or eliminate the current staffs' healthcare, and quite likely more 'sanctions' to follow.

Guess that'll be where Cisco's money will be coming from.

FCOE is not a pipe dream, it's a very useful technology which can be used to good effect with virtualization.

The 6 switches were to provide a best practice virtualization network config which happened to include iSCSI, FC and Ethernet. If you go on a virtualization course from VMware they will fill in the details for you as to why each ESX host requires 8-10 gig ethernet ports and a couple of HBAs. If you speak with any network switch vendor they will gladly explain why iSCSI traffic should not be on the same switch as ethernet traffic, assuming you like your network to perform well.

Please do not assume I am joking or that I am stupid simply because you don't understand what I do for a living. Enterprise virtualization is a very different beast to your home system.