Brocade gives Wall Street the finger The SANs are okay... Brocade beat pessimistic Wall St estimates about its fourth quarter (Q4) earnings and outlook for the next quarter, showing that there is more life in the Fibre Channel and Ethernet vendor than analysts gave it credit for. Revenues in the fourth quarter ending 29 October were $550m, a 9 per cent rise on …
"The continuing threat is that lower-price FCoE will eat into its high-margin FC business."
Right, our calculations show that a NX5000 FcoE port costs 5 times as much as a Brocade 5000 8 Gig FC port. In addition port-to-port latency is at least 3 times as high on the Cisco kit.
FCoE is going nowhere.
FCoE has a large mountain to climb to replace the SAN as we know it. Primarily on the latencies, but I also don't yet see a cost savings. Especially when you start to factor in needing redundant paths and separating storage and network traffic for performance reasons, as well as the cost of the 10GbE ports from Cisco. If anything will replace anything, I think it will be infiniband as the direction, NOT the network. Infiniband may be currently pricey, but those costs will drop much like FC has been doing, and will continue to do so as more and more shops look at it as something for other than HPC for infrastructure consolidation.
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