In reply to CoreEdge.

Hello CoreEdge,

Thanks for taking the time to write such a detail reply. You may be surprised to note that I actually agree with the bulk of what you've written. There are, however, some things that I would like to clarify as I'm not sure that you gleaned my true intention from the post.

Gen5 FC is standards based, at least as much as FC has been up to now.

There is a difference between being "standards-based" (which is, as I said in the post, not an issue at all; Brocade marketing can do whatever it wishes) and being "a standard." The quote identified above seems to indicate that the intention of Brocade to blur the line as to what is or is not standardized went too far, to the point where even a savvy storage tech writer stepped across it.

When you think about next Gen products, don’t think “BW”. BW is not the issue or even what is leading the sales effort

See, I don't think of "Generations" as bandwidth. I think of hardware versions. But the blog post that Brocade put out, in addition to the press release, in addition to the Register article, makes it very clear that they have defined the term "Generation" with the speed delineations.

16 GFC is coming like it or not,

Yes, yes it is. In fact, Brocade has been saying this for two years now. Cisco has always said that we supported and believed in Fibre Channel (and 16GFC in particular), but in 2011 we were getting more requests for better optimization of links and convergence than we were for higher bandwidth FC links.

So where are the 16G arrays? Coming, yes, as you point out. But why weren't they available when Brocade released their forklift replacement chassis? In fact, why weren't they available within two years of their 16GFC chassis?

Meanwhile, you state that it "was a long wait for 10GE to arrive on any array," but the first 10Gb FCoE array was available in November 2008, less than 6 months after the Nexus 5020 was released (actually, more like three-and-a-half, IIRC). Since that time we have high-density arrays for FCoE and extremely broad support for multiple types of deployments - everything from Access Layer convergence to Multihop Topologies with FC-based storage to, yes, even end-to-end FCoE storage networks.

Here we are, though, two years later, and we have been waiting so long Brocade is already talking about 32G next year! I mean, seriously? It took this long to get 16G arrays to market and already they're hinting at 32?

Your comment about feature sets being the same from one speed to another may be true for MDS equipment or limiting the scope to the FCP itself, but it is not true for Brocade products.

Ah... and therein lies the rub, doesn't it? For Brocade it's easier to equate the speed with a "Generation" because every time they talk about a new speed they require a new chassis. So when the first MDS released in 2002 can run FCoE line cards released in 2011, what generation might that be, exactly? After all, Brocade's definition of "Generations" is so vague I'd honestly have no idea how to adopt the moniker "industry wide," as they seem to want to be done.

Making an argument that the scope of features for advancing generations of products is limited to INCITS standards is not really relevant and not an implication that Brocade is making, or should make. This argument of yours is quite a stretch to discredit them and all your effort about INCITS explanations are not really the point, in my opinion.

In this case, it appears that you did not read the Register article, or even the quote I included above, very closely.

You'll note that they don't talk about the "5th Generation" switch. Everywhere they have this discussion they are talking about Fibre Channel - the protocol - not their equipment.

Quite frankly, it's not exactly "a stretch" on my part. Take a look at some of the twitter stream after Brocade's initial blog post, or even EtherealMind's response, and you can easily see that I am not alone in my interpretation.

Cisco lost great credibility with us over this debacle and frankly, I highly doubt any claims Cisco makes concerning market share are true.

I'm afraid you lost me here. What "debacle" are you referring to?

I think your claim of Brocade having 1% FCoE market share is bupkus

Well, you make a pretty broad statement about Dell 'Oro, but as I happen to be on the Dell 'Oro calls and receive their reports, I can tell you that they do report the FCoE SAN Switching Market Share, and this is a number that is consistent with their analysis.

I would certainly deploy Brocade VDX/VCS 6730 for FCoE over Nexus anytime, if we were to ever do any such thing.

Really? Wow, I have to say that surprises me. :)

Kidding aside, the subject of this post was very specific. There is no comparison about products here, or implementations, or even design philosophies. I did not say that 16G "wasn't going to happen" or that Brocade doesn't try to offer value to their customers. Nor did I say that they shouldn't continue to develop products at faster and faster speeds.

What I said was that I observed a marketing ploy that was amusing until they started messing around with calling it a 'standard.' "Truth in advertising" and all that, you know. The standards are there for a reason, people do use them to make decisions and determinations, even if you do not happen to count yourself among them. For that reason (and the ones I enumerated above) we must avoid confusion and ensure they don't move from "marketecture" into "blatant intent to mislead people."

Perhaps we can agree that no matter how much we like our vendors we should hold them to a certain standard (pun intended) of reality.

Thanks again for taking the time to write.