Chuck Hollis at EMC and I have disagreed some about the future of protocols for SANs - sometimes it spilled over and included others, like Dante Malagrino from Cisco.
So I'm done with the great protocol debate, at least for now. With HP's intent to buy Lefthand, the lone iSCSI -exclusive SAN storage company is going away into corporate purgatory. I don't see HP doing that much more to promote iSCSI than what Dell has done - letting customers "vote with their wallets".
(FWIW, 3PAR has customers using both FC and iSCSI. Funny how working for a protocol-agnostic company can mellow one out.)
Heated discussion isn't fighting! Hopefully, once this market shakes out (we'll all be working for GE or Taco Bell one day), there will be enough money for all of the storage protocols. I'm inventing a new protocol, FCoTR (Fibre Channel over Token Ring). Let the flaming begin!
Posted by: Steven Schwartz - The SAN Technologist | October 07, 2008 at 04:51 PM
Ha ha. I always like SNA via carrier pigeon. Or I guess I picked a bad week to stop slurping sterno. Whatever, the world turned and I had to stop being an iSCSI idealist.
Posted by: marc farley | October 07, 2008 at 05:27 PM
Funny how having lots of choices in your product portfolio makes you a bit less religious :-)
iSCSI continues to do well, as does FC, as does NAS. And, a year from now, we'll probably see yet another round of FCoE discussions as well. But, it too shows every sign of being able to do well.
Last April 1, I wrote a post about EMC's interest in FCoW (Fibre Channel over Wireless). Too bad that a lot of people didn't know it was a complete and utter joke.
Says a lot about people who watch this industry ...
Posted by: Chuck Hollis | October 07, 2008 at 06:37 PM
Chuck, FCow..... or F-cow.... or effin' cow.... whatever - THAT is funny! Do you have an encore planned for next April?
Posted by: marc farley | October 07, 2008 at 09:10 PM
WTF? How do you equate eating crow to smearing cow shit all over yourself?
Seriously, great post - I really learned a lot about the storage industry and the different protocols. Thanks!
Posted by: SlagMacG | October 08, 2008 at 09:01 AM
Well, that was a case of mixing metaphors (and video footage).
(added a few minutes latter) BTW, best of luck with the acquisition. I hope things turn out well for you.
Posted by: marc farley | October 08, 2008 at 09:07 AM
Settle down Mark, it’s ok. I think you may be spending too much time out at the farm. Believe me, iSCSI is going to be alive and well and move up market in a big way with 10 Gig. Yes, FCoE will get some traction, but so will iSCSI with I/OAT, RDMA, and even iSCSI over the new Data Center Ethernet. If TCP issues go away then everyone is happy.
FCoE: The Data Center Bridging specification won’t be ratified for a few years, even though Cisco and others are saying they are already shipping it. Do you remember the interoperability nightmare that the Fibre Channel industry put their customers through in the beginning? Do you remember when Cisco started shipping iSCSI products before the spec. was ratified? How many of those products are customers still using today? The fact that FCoE isn’t routable and is incompatible with the impervious set of IP based infrastructures and management tools out there, iSCSI will be around for the foreseeable future.
I’ll have to disagree with you on LeftHand being a pure-play iSCSI vendor. LeftHand is not tied to iSCSI, our architecture is protocol agnostic. For example, we shipped a Fibre Channel interface on the Intel SSR316MJ2 and have a nice Fibre Channel stack in house, but I don’t believe we will be using again any time soon. The industry is clearly moving to Ethernet. Ethernet is the global networking standard, and I can imagine a universal Ethernet adapter that runs any protocol you desire over Ethernet, even Infiniband. In 5-10 years the protocol wars will be behind us and it will be all about virtualization layers.
A few comments on the acquisition: Unlike Dell, HP has world-class software technology and a large software development workforce, which will help LeftHand take scale-out storage and server architectures to the next level. When Dell bought EqualLogic they bought into a 6 year old legacy MIPS RISC hardware box that is very simple to deploy and easy to manage, but is a dead-end as far as technology goes. Where will Dell take the EqualLogic’s software into the future? The answer is nowhere, because Dell is a box pusher not a technology company like HP. This bodes well for the continuing success of LeftHand’s technology and iSCSI.
John
Posted by: John Spiers | October 08, 2008 at 09:49 AM
OK... call me stupid... but who is investing in iSCSI now? From everything I'm hearing, Qlogic is bailing on iSCSI and focusing on FCoE. If the HBA guys aren't investing in iSCSI, where's the roadmap?
On a side note.. I love iSCSI, I'm just trying to read tea leaves.
Posted by: James Orlean | October 08, 2008 at 01:37 PM
The HBA guys are bailing out on iSCSI because the iSCSI guys are bailing on HBAs after realizing that they don't need them.
Storage in general is growing and iSCSI will continue to grow as well. I'm thinking that having bigger companies like Dell and HP behind iSCSI will actually improve its percieved legitimacy in the enterprise datacenter - IF said companies will champion it like they should.
Posted by: Chris Fricke | October 13, 2008 at 11:16 AM
Chris, as you wrote; IF said companies will champion it like they should. Big IF.
Posted by: marc farley | October 13, 2008 at 12:12 PM