blog.scottlowe.org has a nice post titled Continuing the FCoE Discussion
Lunk : http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/12/09/continuing-the-fcoe-discussion/
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Tonight, after reading a blog post by Dave Graham regarding FCoE vs. InfiniBand, I started thinking about FCoE again, and I came up with a question I want to ask. I’m not a storage expert, and I don’t have decades of experience in the storage arena like many others that write about storage. The question I’m about to ask, then, may just be the uneducated ranting of a fool. If so, you’re welcome to enlighten me in the comments.
Here’s the question: how is FCoE any better than iSCSI?
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I tend to get slightly fired up about this and I did post a comment, which is awaiting moderation.
I will quote it here
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slowe,
I tend to agree with you, additionally, it is very easy to scale iSCSI, where you are stuck with one controller on a EMC / Netapp FC array, each iSCSI array ( EQL) has it’s own controller.
Therefore, if you have three racks of EMC or Three Racks of EQL, ( 12 per rack ) the array each have two controller’s each ( or at least most that I have seen do ) where the , EQL iSCSI, would have something like 36 controllers, vs three EMC controllers for the same amount of storage.
Now Even if you had 8 GB FC, wouldn’t you be limited to 8GB X 4ports X 3 Controllers = 96 GB
To make it even, lets say you had iSCSI sans with 10 GB controllers, 10 GB X 2port X 36 Controllers = 720 GB
Hence, if you had a Six top end switches @ 10 GB, Connected to 36 10 GB Sans all on the same switch back plane, wouldn’t the EQL have better throughput than FC Over Ethernet?
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