We think that, initially, the price points will be higher because youre talking about 10-Gig Ethernet, not Ethernet, he told Byte and Switch. Its an interesting technology, but its not going to replace Fibre Channel as a method to connect your servers to storage anytime soon.
Brocades rival Cisco, which launched its Nexus 5000 unified fabric switch earlier this year, is painting a much rosier picture of FCOE.
We actually have [a] shipping product, so we have some experience with how the customer adoption is going, sniped Jackie Ross, Ciscos vice president of partner marketing. [And] were seeing a different view.
The Cisco exec explained that multiple hundreds of customers are evaluating the Nexus 500 in areas such as financial services, telecommunications, health care, government, and the service provider sector.
We will see production deployments around the August timeframe, added Ross. We believe that we will start to see production [deployments] in numbers before the end of calendar year 08.