Fibre Channel to fade a bit

Storage data is going to grow a great deal going forward. We expect unstructured data to grow faster as more and more data is published to the web, and to internal intranet sites using tools such as Microsoft’s SharePoint. Fibre Channel is expensive and is tied to structured data.

To date, Google has not moved to 10GbE to connect their servers and storage together. With their model, the two SATA drives do not overcome the constraints of 1GbE. This is change as FLASH is more widely used as a caching mechanism in servers, probably along the order of 5-12 GBs per server. The FLASH caches will allow faster, lower latency connections that will overrun 1GbE forcing upgrades in their switching infrastructure to 10GbE with the switches needing 40Gb and 100Gb uplinks. This same phenomenon will occur at Public Cloud providers. Fibre Channel will continue to be used for structured data applications and with increased Wall Street regulations, which inevitably will drive the need for more structured data. As the industry begins to make 40Gb and 100Gb connections affordable, especially for transceivers that only need to reach 1 km on single mode fiber, and FCoE and iSCSI become mature, many new applications for structured data will move to Ethernet.

July 28, 2011

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