In reply to gchapman.

Why would the encoding scheme change IOPS?

One thing the encoding scheme changed was that 16 Gbit FC, from my understanding, doesn't have to run at full 16 Gbits. Through 8 Gb FC, each Gigabit would give you 100 MBytes of throughput, and not 125 MBytes like you do with raw Ethernet. (1,000 / 8 = 125). This is because of the 8/10 encoding, so you lose 20% of each Gigabit.

Because they moved to 64/66 encoding, the overhead is not nearly as high, so you don't lose 20%. You lose like 3%.

But FC sticks to 100 MBytes per Gigabit, so 16 GBit/s FC is actually 14.6 Gbit/FC. Because 14.6 Gbit still provides 1600 MBytes/s.

So while there is a benefit to moving to 64/66 encoding, the savings are already baked into the standard. That's my understanding at least, please correct me if I'm wrong.