Another View From SNW

As conferences go, Storage Networking World in Orlando is aptly named. Over the years, it always seemed that the primary activity at SNW was vendors, and other industry luminaries like your humble reporter, networking with each other. End users are invited, but SNIA (the Storage Networking Industry Association) never seemed to really be focusing on drawing end users in the way, say, the Storage Decisions shows do.

In fact, SNIA is determined to control every aspect of SNW. As one SNIA director told me last year, "We'd never put this conference in Las Vegas. People might be distracted and go to Siegfried and Roy rather than the awards banquet."

This year, with the economy in the dumps and travel budgets cut to the bone, the show seems a lot quieter. I got to registration at 11 a.m. on Monday and breezed right through without a wait on line. Then I went up to the press room for some much needed coffee.

Show management claimed that while the sponsor (read: exhibitor -- but at SNW even the coffee in the hallways is sponsored by a specific vendor) count was down 50 percent, the paid attendee count was down by just 40 people. Every SNW veteran I spoke to agreed that it felt like a smaller crowd -- I guess all the vendor staff and the VIPs on free passes made up the difference.

Light attendance didnt mean a lack of interesting things to see and chat about. No new trends emerged, but there were lots of new products in this year's hot markets, including FCoE, data de-duplication, and flash memory for data storage.Brocade probably made the biggest news, announcing their 8000 converged FCoE/FC/CEE switch, which has 24 10-Gig Ethernet and eight 8-Gig FC ports along with single- and dual-port CNAs. Frankly, there were no surprises here except perhaps that the new switch is completely managed by Brocade's Data Center Fabric Manager, where the Cisco Nexus 5000 I used in the FCoE hands-on lab had a GUI for the FC side but the Ethernet side had to be managed from the command line using good old IOS commands.

QLogic and Emulex quickly responded with emails to the press and the rest of the chattering class that Brocade was "extremely late to market," had no real HBA design wins, used too many chips, used too much power, and generally smelled bad. (OK, smelled bad was mine.)

It escapes me how the second player in the FCoE switch market and the third in the CNA market can be extremely late especially as I'd be really surprised if Emulex and QLogic combined had sold (not lent or given away) 1,000 CNAs between them.

I shared a set of equipment with a Brocade user for the FCoE hands-on lab, and she complained about the Cisco switch's UI, or lack thereof for the Ethernet side, several times. I expect those organizations with Emulex HBAs and Cisco switches for FC will use the same for FCoE and those with QLogic HBAs and Brocade will do the same. The JNI/McData/Gadzooks crowd is however up for grabs.

Next time, the SNW wrap up with flash, de-dupe, and other cool news.InformationWeek Analytics has published an independent analysis of the challenges around enterprise storage. Download the report here (registration required).

— Howard Marks is chief scientist at Networks Are Our Lives Inc., a Hoboken, N.J.-based consultancy where he's been beating storage network systems into submission and writing about it in computer magazines since 1987. He currently writes for InformationWeek, which is published by the same company as Byte and Switch.