In reply to Tony B.

Apologize if my comment was misleading. The encoding scheme doesn't change the IOPS, it simply reduces overhead and results in greater efficiency.

I fully understand the ridicule laid at the "1 meelyun iops" claims, but lets be honest, its the standard of measurement that the marketing and technical journalist class live by. I will say this, in testing that we performed, which was backed up by Demartek, the current crop of 16GFC adapters were capable of 400k IOPS on a 8k workload on a single port. If high IO is a requirement for your storage needs, you will have to increase your port count on 8GFC to reach those numbers (by a factor of 5 in many cases). So I say do more with less.

Case in point, look at how VMware reaches 1 Million IOPS on a virtual machine, its with six 8GFC adapters working together. Not a realistic situation for most, but I do see many instances of four and six 8GFC adapters being placed into quad socket boxes. If we can deliver the same performance with 1/4th the number of adapters then we are doing the customer a service and reducing their power, heat, and cable footprint. I say think bigger. Think outside a few hosts here and there. Think thousands.

16GFC isn't a move to higher bandwidth, its a move to higher efficiency, lower latency, and better overall response times for workloads. PCIe3.0 helps as well, but the fact remains that the current 8GFC chip designs are nearly 7 years old. Modern 16GFC asics are built off multicore architectures and are capable of far more than simple FC capabilities. Combo cards that do 10G as well as 16GFC provide a best case scenario for many organizations looking for increased redundancy without having to stuff twice the number of cards in their servers. Wasn't that one of the value adds of "convergence" in the first place?

I think there are very few actual workloads that can take advantage of the advances made in FC and Ethernet. As things speed up, things start to break. 40GbE has its place, but its most likely not in the server rack space, perhaps blades where greater consolidation of physical nodes can take advantage of the increased bandwidth available. Then again, look at the price points needed to deploy 40GbE and then see if it makes sense. I think the ROI still isn't there yet.