PRO+ Premium Content/Storage magazine

The next generation of Ethernet is likely to have a profound effect on storage—pumped-up iSCSI performance may challenge Fibre Channel's tier 1 dominance. By Christine Cignoli It's barely even here yet, but 10Gb Ethernet (10GigE) is going to have a hard time living up to its hype. Hailed as a "game changing" technology by some, it carries the burden of being a cure-all for storage (and network) managers' problems. But when you look beyond the hyperbole surrounding 10GigE, you'll see the technology is, in many ways, still just emerging. That's not to suggest that 10GigE won't deliver on its promise -- perhaps not a cure-all, but certainly destined to give iSCSI storage and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) topologies a big boost. Still, real products are few and far between at this time, and per-port prices are still at a very un-Ethernet premium. While there have been some early adopters, its first few inroads into the market have been in higher-end implementations such as super-high-performance computing. Switch vendors are ...