Talk about incendiary... especially considering the instructor's audience: mostly Dell technical personnel. (MD3000i, EqualLogic ring a bell?) This statement was delivered, probably without much thought on how it would be received by the attendees, during a recent training session. The course focused on products that play almost exclusively in a fiber channel SAN arena. The teacher was "kinda like a nut living amongst squirrels." More than once that day, a heated discussion flared on iSCSI vs fiber channel and eventually spanned to cover FCoE as well.
Naturally, I tweeted about the entertaining debate. The twitter response was equally interesting. It was as if I had mentioned Microsoft in a Linux forum. Ford vs. Chevy. You get the idea --it's a religion. I began to think about my last 10 years at another company. The kool-aid I was drinking was the color of orange wires. The instructor's glasses, understandably, seem to be a little orange tinted as well. Its what he and his company grew up with. Over the next few days, I discussed this topic with several folks in and out of the DellTechCenter. I also read a number of related interesting blogs and forum posts. What did I learn? Here's a quick summary of the various opinions I ran into this week:
Fiber Channel:
FC SANS are thought of for performance and reliability. Management and implementation of FC SANS requires a specific knowledge set and can be viewed as expensive to get started. Another common opinion was that customers with FC investments likely won't be quick to adopt or move to iSCSI.
iSCSI:
iSCSI is generally viewed as easy and less expensive to implement from both a training and hardware perspective. It's likely the infrastructure skills required already exist within the companies evaluating the technologies. Although, sometimes the intricacies of infrastructure configuration for best performance are somewhat glossed over. The iSCSI SANS found their way into the smaller shops initially, but has quickly been moving up the food chain. The predominant opinion is that when 10 Gb Ethernet becomes widely accepted, so will iSCSI.
FCoE:
There were tentative opinions in the group on FCoE. The common thread was that the cost for the needed additional hardware might hinder market acceptance.
Fortunately, I have multi-colored kool-aid these days. As a storage evangelist for DellTechCenter, I have the opportunity to evaluate and write about the various technologies. I previously did not have hands on experience with iSCSI. Now that I've had a chance to connect a few servers to both EqualLogic and MD3000i arrays, I was truly surprised at how easy it was to get going. Factor in the ease of implementation, equivalent storage features (mpio, replication, snapshot, etc), scalability and cost of the solutions --the 'not enterprise' opinion seems a bit uninformed. I personally don't see it as an end to fiber though. In this industry these type of debates will always come up. I'm sure there were token-ring proponents that had similar opinions on Ethernet's viability in the enterprise.