IP based storage is picking up
During these past presentations at Tech Field Day, the overall notion I got was that all (new) storage vendors announcing new products are putting the focus of connectivity at IP based storage primarily. Some are still putting in Fibre Channel as a method of connectivity, it isn’t their most important one anymore.
You can definitely notice the adoption of CEE (Converged Enhanced Ethernet) or DCB (Data Center Bridging) and it might still enable vendors to put in the FC protocol, but iSCSI and NFS/CIFS is actually getting much more attention than I would have anticipated. In the list of products we have discussed the last two days, there’s actually just one that has FC on board.
- NEC HYDRAstor (CIFS/NFS)
- Compellent, iSCSI and FC (Series 20, 30 and 40)
- Compellent NAS head
- NimbleStorage CS Series (iSCSI)
- F5 Networks (actually only file service virtualization as a storage product, but definitely IP based)
I know there’s way more vendors out there, but I just wanted to illustrate my observations of the last couple of days. For a complete list, I might be putting up a new post.
The 10Gb Ethernet is definitely changing the arena here, and FC might lose the dominance in the data-center after a renewal cycle or two.
