Finally, a Realistic FCoE Forecast

A quick follow-up to my mention last week of Seamus Crehan’s analysis and forecast for FCoE deployments … this week I came across an article by Drew Robb who has also seen Crehan’s forecast.  You can find the article here.

Two things strike me about all this. 

The first is that the early analyst FCoE forecasts suffered from the usual shortcomings driven by the new technology hype cycle:

·       Exponential-growth forecast (it’s really easy to do in Excel…)

·       Relatively oblivious to changes in industry economic situation

·       Published before the standard is approved

·       Doesn’t take into account who will deploy the technology or why

… which is probably why Robb starts the article with the observation that “adoption rates haven't yet lived up to the propaganda”.

The second point is that Crehan’s forecast really does seem to take into account today’s realities (requirements, drivers and benefits):

·       Support by all the Fibre Channel infrastructure vendors,

·       Mainstream 10GbE deployment in place.

·       DCB support in “network consolidation” switches

·       Well-documented I/O consolidation savings published by multiple vendors

·       Minimally-disruptive evolutionary path from Fibre Channel network to unified 10GbE network

·       Strong business imperative to pursue IT infrastructure efficiencies through virtualization at the server, network and storage layers

 Suddenly the world seems to be a much saner place…