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Are We Putting The Cart Before the FCoE Horse?: Page 2 of 2

The payoff from FCoE may be years in the making, possibly five or six years into the future when most if not the entire data center is on a cost effective CEE infrastructure. That will also provide time for the tools to catch up with the environment so that you will truly have a single point of management and operation of the combined network.

The other issue that continues to bother me and I think threatens FCoE adoption is that the network and storage are two distinctly different groups in many organizations. I have been in several meetings discussing FCoE with a customer -- and we were introducing the network guys to the storage guys because they had never met before! Dealing with the politics of merging the groups together may take longer than merging the physical infrastructure.

With that, I don't think that you have to consider FCoE in this go around. If you want to get the move underway, that's fine -- but don't feel pressured to move to it today. If you need faster performance and want to stay with standard FC, then 8 Gbps is a proven tact to take and there is little chance of you being left out of the FCoE conversion movement when it happens.

As a result, pick vendors that are committed to both paths, traditional FC and FCoE. Make sure they have at least a 16-Gbps FC roadmap as well as a FCoE roadmap, make sure they have a solid mechanism for integrating mixed infrastructures. During times of change, you want all your options available -- you don't want to be forced into picking the winner.