Fibre Channel is still around. And now it's end-to-end at a sizzling-ish 64Gbit/s

Fibre Channel hasn't been exciting since storage area networks were young, hot, and pretty. But the protocol is still around, still has devotees, and just got an upgrade. A seventh generation of Fibre Channel has been in the works for years, with a theoretical speed of 64Gbit/s. But while the likes of Broadcom had delivered …

[Korev]

> And to those still using Infiniband, we salute you.

It\'s still the interconnect of choice for those of us in HPC[0]

[0] Unless you're rich enough to be running a Cray

[hoola]

And that is the point of IB & FC, not just bandwidth but very low latency. In HPC latency can be the killer that saps a huge amount of performance.

[Anonymous Coward]

> In HPC latency can be the killer that saps a huge amount of performance.

Wasn't the quote from Dr Bandwidth

You can always buy more width, but you can't bribe God.

[elip]

Not sure why all the calls to 'small numbers' of people still running FC or Infiniband. I've worked at 12-14 different companies of different sizes (from 12 person startups to 300K employee engineering behemoths) in the last 21 years and all were running critical workloads on FC, with some more scientifically inclined shops running Infiniband. Is the author suggesting that mid and large enterprises are running app and db workloads mostly on local storage? If so, that has not been my experience.

[hopkinse]

FCoE is gaining traction in bigger enterprises and iSCSI at the other end of the scale.

[flsanguy]

FCoE is dead

I've worked and talked to a ton of companies (larger fortune 500 style). The only one I know of that ran FCoE has been trying to get out of it since they got in. It just had too many issues. Also, linux dropped native support for it.

Turns out network guys are good at doing network stuff but bad at low latency lossless traffic that storage traffic requires.