re: Dell jumps out into iSCSI lead

Drue Reeves — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:53:33 GMT

Marc,

Drue here again...

Congratulations. Dell's position in this space is well earned.

One question though...the announcement with Cisco around the Nexus 5500 (back in April) seems to imply that Dell is on-board with FCoE as well.

“Realizing Dell’s vision of simplifying IT requires an integrated ecosystem, and the new Cisco Nexus 5000 series contributes to this goal,” said Praveen Asthana, Dell Storage & Networking Director. “The unified fabric enables the all-Ethernet data center without compromising performance or flexibility by consolidating iSCSI and Fibre Channel traffic in one 10 Gigabyte Ethernet switch. The Nexus 5000’s bandwidth provides the flexibility that virtualized storage and servers demand.”

Now, I'm sure that Dell's position is FCoE is necessary to bridge servers to existing FC storage. Got it...that's our opinion too. But, no one seems to be asking the "what if" question. What if someone (say EMC or NetApp) were to create an FCoE target? There's certainly no technical reason they couldn't...and I'm not sure (if DCE is a given) why they wouldn't. Certinaly helps protect their existing customer base.

Drue