Interesting response concerning Brocade, a few comments...

I doubt that Brocade is trying to confuse or befuddle customers by calling 16GFC -> Gen5, nor do I believe that Brocade is trying to convince customers that it has developed some version of FC outside of the standards bodies. Gen5 FC is standards based, at least as much as FC has been up to now. There has never been supported E_Port interoperability between the two companies, so what's the difference if it is or not? Clearly, it has to work with the end devices. The feature set included with 16GFC products is Brocade's proprietary value add and has nothing to do with standards and the reason why some customers buy Brocade. To be fair, the same is true with Cisco MDS. I think the purpose of GenX marketing is straight forward, "don't buy based on port speed alone, buy based on product feature set", and Gen5 has advanced features over Gen4.

When you think about next Gen products, don’t think “BW”. BW is not the issue or even what is leading the sales effort. I’ve never had an SE come in and tell me I need twice as much BW. That’s ridiculous. But there are things I do need. BW is merely the side effect of technology marching forward, Moore’s Law kind of thing. Think “features and functionality”, which is better described by the generation than by the maximum port BW. Brocade's Gen X has always had the lowest switching latency (measured in nanoseconds) and highest IOPS, hands down and will continue to do so with Gen 5, 6… Considering bit serialization time onto the wire is significantly less as port speed increases. You can say Gen 5 provides faster overall response times in an environment that requires many IOPS before the user's application responds. Additionally, Brocade's Gen 5 has mechanisms that prevent common workloads in parallel from getting trounced upon, consider Virtual Circuits, QoS… for instance.

16 GFC is coming like it or not, Brocade is always the first and the industry closely follows. IBM will come out with 16 Gbps on the mainframe. All the major arrays will have 16GFC. As for 40GE FCoE/iSCSI, let's see the feature sets and relative robustness of architecture that goes with that speed bump? It was a long wait for 10GE to arrive on any array and I suspect that 40GE is not coming within the next 3 years from those very same companies.

Clearly, there is no obvious comparison between 16GFC and 40GE. Why would you even say that? To me, that seems silly. In our shop, if we wanted to move to 16GFC that is relatively easy in both connectivity and migration of devices. If we wanted to move towards 40GE, or even 10GE, FCoE or iSCSI, that would be monumentally difficult and unlikely to happen. To be honest, FCoE is undesirable for many reasons, some not technical in nature (i.e., cultural, operations, no clear ROI). We have a better chance of moving to NAS vs. FCoE, just to put it in perspective.

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. Each Gen has significant new features. 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.

About Brocade and FCoE market share...
Dell’Oro Group explains the whole sordid mess and why that firm took corrective measures:

"NOTES: We began including FCoE capable products in our SAN Market tables in 2009 in order to reflect how FC was converting to FCoE. However, we recently discovered that only a small portion of FCoE products are actually being deployed to carry SAN traffic. The majority of FCoE products are being deployed to carry LAN traffic and therefore to reflect the sales performance of these products vis-à-vis FC products is misleading. Effective January 2012, we have removed FCoE switches, controllers and adapters from the total SAN Market tables, and placed the data into the Appendices. We plan to investigate and analyze the portion of FCoE products that are being deployed for SAN."

Cisco lost great credibility with us over this debacle and frankly, I highly doubt any claims Cisco makes concerning market share are true. I think your claim of Brocade having 1% FCoE market share is bupkus and I would certainly deploy Brocade VDX/VCS 6730 for FCoE over Nexus anytime, if we were to ever do any such thing.