Protocol wars: Can Fibre Channel survive Ethernet’s assault?

Protocol wars: Can Fibre Channel survive Ethernet’s assault?
Although Fibre Channel is seeing single-digit growth rates, Ethernet for storage is exploding

Computerworld – Fibre Channel, the high-speed data transport protocol for storage area networks (SAN), is under increasing pressure as data centers move toward Ethernet for all data network traffic and SAS for hardware interconnects.

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By no means is Fibre Channel down and out. In fact, recent figures indicate it’s still showing low single-digit, year-over-year growth. The protocol is currently used in $50 billion worth of equipment around the world, according to research firm Gartner.

Because corporate data centers are slow to change out technology, the Fibre Channel networking market will likely continue to show sluggish growth for the next five to 10 years. After that, Ethernet looks to be the protocol of the future.

“The counter winds against Ethernet is that there’s a lot of politics and a lot of religion around Fibre Channel,” said Forrester analyst Andrew Reichmann. “[But] Ethernet can do most everything Fibre Channel can do. Ethernet is cheaper, more ubiquitous.”

And it allows IT managers to find the best fit for specific application workloads, he said. “As those decisions move more toward a workload-centric approach, the one that makes the most sense is Ethernet. For example, it makes more sense to put your [virtual machine] infrastructure on iSCSI or NFS [network file system] because there’s very little difference in the performance you get compared to Fibre Channel.”

Slowing the move to Ethernet — for now — are the usual IT turf battles. Storage networks and hardware are purchased by the storage team, which controls that portion of the overall IT budget. Moving to an all-Ethernet infrastructure means giving that budget away to the networking group, according to Reichmann.

On top of that, some storage administrators simply don’t believe Ethernet is robust enough for data storage traffic. They’ve always used Fibre Channel and see it as the fastest, most reliable way to move data between servers and back-end storage.

“All those factors make it hard to move away from Fibre Channel,” Reichmann said.

Market research firm IDC predicts Fibre Channel will remain at the core of many data centers (supporting mission-critical mainframe and Unix-based applications), while most future IT asset deployments will leverage 10GbE (and later 40GbE) for the underlying storage interconnect. This transition will lead eventually to market revenue losses for Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBA) and switch products.

As the Fibre Channel market shrinks, IDC predicts “rapid and sustained revenue growth” for 10GbE storage interconnect hardware such as converged network adapters (CNA), 10GbE network interface cards (NIC) and switches. (A CNA is simply a network interface card that allows access to both SANs and more common LAN networks by offering multiple protocols such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and straight Ethernet.)

SAS and Fibre Channel drives

Although Fibre Channel switch revenues have remained relatively flat over the past two years, according to Gartner, Fibre Channel disk drive sales have plummeted. Vendors are expected to stop shipping them within five years.

“We’re forecasting SAS will replacing Fibre Channel because it provides more flexibility and it lowers engineering costs,” said Gartner analyst Stan Zaffos.

High-performance applications such as relational databases will be supported by SANs made up of 5% solid-state drives and 95% SAS drives, according to Forrester’s Reichmann. SAS, or serial-attached SCSI drives, are dual-ported for resilience and are just as fast as their Fibre Channel counterparts.

Unlike Fibre Channel, SAS shares a common backplane with cheap, high-capacity serial ATA (SATA) drives, so they’re interchangeable and can be mixed among drive trays. It also allows for simpler data migration in a tiered storage infrastructure.
IP storage is a buyer’s market

Gartner recently released figures showing that over the past two years, shipments of Fibre Channel HBAs and switches have remained relatively flat, while 10GbE unit shipments have soared. According to Gartner, shipments of 10GbE NICs rose from 259,000 in 2009 to more than 1.4 million last year. And it’s a buyer’s market, with prices falling through the floor due to fierce competition between seven principle vendors, including Intel, Broadcom, QLogic and Emulex.

“Prices for 10GbE hardware is going into the Dumpster. The market has to stabilize around three vendors before we see something from the revenue side,” said Sergis Mushell, an analyst at Gartner.

According to Mushell, single-port 10GbE NICs sell for $43 to $60 dollars; a year ago they went for $100. Dual-ported 10GbE NICs now go for about $300. And CNA cards sell for between $700 and $1,000.

In comparison, a 4Gbps Fibre Channel HBA sells for $337, while an 8Gbps HBA ranges between $1,000 and about $1,900 on sites such as Pricegrabber.com.

In the first quarter of 2010, Fibre Channel switch revenue totaled $1.59 billion; a year later it hit $1.66 billion; and in the third quarter of 2011, it was $1.58 billion. (Those figures includes both 4Gbps and 8Gbps modular and fixed switches.)

Sales of Fibre Channel HBAs — network interface cards that are required for servers and storage arrays alike — have also struggled. In the first quarter of 2010, HBA revenue totaled $781 million. While it rose to $855 million in the first quarter of 2011, it dropped back to $811 million by the third quarter of the year.

According to IDC, as the economic recession abated in 2010, IT shops began server upgrades that had been deferred, with an increased use of server and storage virtualization. To manage those virtualized infrastructures, IT managers sought out a set of standard elements: x86 processors for computing, PCI for system buses, Ethernet for networking and SAS for hard drive and SSD interfaces.

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