J,

I want to thank you for opening this great discussion. As a vendor of iSCSI storage solutions, obviously I - and Dell - has a vested interest in this topic :)

That being said, I would ask your to clarify your position that iSCSI is a "converged solution" by definition. Simply because it leverages a common standard transport protocol, does not automatically mean that it should be converged with non-storage traffic.

Simply by deciding to use iSCSI (as opposed to FC or FCoE)does not mean I should abandon very valid and necessary storage design best practices. I would still want to be in control of the network design including Fan-in, and flow control. All of the same design point we have all learned from FC design apply for any Enterprise class storage solution regardless of protocol.

I agree that haphazardly plugging an iSCSI storage array into an existing network, without any idea of how that network was designed would be risky at best and disasterous at worst.

With a well designed, dedicated network, iSCSI is an very capable and comparable storage technology to FC...especially at 10Gb

We believe that "converged networks" = "data center bridged" networks. We would not recommend trying to merge storage and non-storage traffic in any situation without the level of QoS control that DCB can provide. The ability to actively manage iSCSI via ETS and PFC is just as important to iSCSI as it is for FCoE.

Again, thanks for the discussion. I would encourage you to review our whitepaper on iSCSI over DCB here: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/storage/w/wiki/4355.configuring-dcb-with-equallogic-sans.aspx

Thanks again!
Tony Ansley