Brocade deal to help drive data center transition

IDG News Service - Brocade Communications Systems Inc.'s planned $3 billion acquisition of Foundry Networks Inc. is a major strategic move in a war brewing over the future of data center connectivity, industry analysts said yesterday.

The deal, expected to close in the fourth quarter, would combine a maker of Fibre Channel storage-area network switches for data centers and a specialist in enterprise Ethernet LANs, two technologies that are headed toward a merger themselves.

The future of data centers lies with Ethernet because it's relatively inexpensive, keeps scaling up to higher speeds and is ubiquitous throughout the rest of enterprise networks, analysts said. Virtualization and data center consolidation are helping to drive demand for Ethernet's growing speeds. The idea is to create a "unified fabric" that spans both the data center at the enterprise's core and the LAN, where client systems are located. But there are two main ways to bring Ethernet to data centers with the features needed there.

Both Brocade and Cisco Systems Inc. are pushing FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), an IEEE standard expected later this year that would combine characteristics of both systems. Mapping Fibre Channel traffic over Ethernet networks would let enterprises take advantage of Ethernet speeds of 10Gbit/sec. and more while keeping the latency, security and traffic management benefits of Fibre Channel. FCoE will also smooth the migration to Ethernet by letting the two technologies coexist in a single switch, so existing SANs can stay.

The alternative is iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface), which some smaller companies have adopted because it can be used with conventional Ethernet switches and without in-house Fibre Channel expertise, said Bob Laliberte, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. Its main proponents have been storage vendors, he said.

Although it will take years for current Fibre Channel SANs to be replaced, one of the two is likely to win out, analysts said.

"There's a major religious war between FCoE and iSCSI," said Burton Group Inc. analyst Dave Passmore. They represent completely different technical approaches to combining Ethernet and storage transport protocols, he said. "Reasonable people will disagree," Passmore said.

Like Fibre Channel, FCoE does not use TCP/IP, the basic communication protocol of the Internet and Ethernet networks, instead making up for it with other tools. Of the two approaches, only FCoE requires expensive, specialized switches, Passmore said, but it's more attractive to many organizations because it allows for a smoother transition from existing architectures, he said.

Enterprises could eventually lose out by choosing the technology that doesn't catch on, but FCoE and iSCSI will probably coexist for years, Passmore said.

A unified fabric could save users money as well as complexity, Passmore said. For example, instead of having one network connection to the LAN and another to the SAN that it taps into for data, a blade server could have just one set of connections.