Emulex hopes 16Gbps Fibre Channel will give it the kiss of life

Emulex is pinning hopes on 16Gbps Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter (HBA) growth after Q4 sales flatlined and it recorded a $28.8m (£18.37m) loss. And with Broadcom's legal fangs still fastened to its ankles, it's just no fun at all for the firm in the storage networking adapter business. Let's briefly set the scene: the company …

[A Non e-mouse]

The combined effects of FCoE and iSCSI will drive storage networking to Ethernet over the next few years

I've recently been looking at a new SAN, and was looking at iSCSI vs FC. I was surprised that 4/8Gb FC is still way cheaper than 10Gb iSCSI.

[Levente Szileszky]

I wouldn't bet on it beyond short term...

...unless he meant picking over incumbent FC installation carcass is their new way of life. :P

I think most SMEs are either already happy with 10GbE and when they need more the new Windows Server 2012 (out in 3 weeks) offers very granular, built-in scalability (teaming, active-active clustering etc) or just considering stepping up to 10GbE and iSCSI, leaving their FC4 gear behind...

Data centers and enterprise storage systems might just stick with FC (FCoE is nowhere to be seen so far) but OTOH if we are talking about the bandwidth-driven segment (eg HPC) IB is a *LOT* faster without added complexity and is very affordable now: a 36-port FDR (56Gb per port, all line-rate) switch is around $8k, HBAs cost the same as FC ones etc.