The slow death of Fibre Channel?

I'm not sure if you have noticed, but slowly over the last year or so storage vendors have begun changing over their top tier offerings from Fibre Channel (FC) drives to either Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)  or Solid State Disk (SSD) drives in their arrays.

The sudden rapid change is interesting, as Fibre Channel drives have been the mainstay in the data center for years now. Even the vaunted FC protocol has begun a slow and steady decline in favor of newer technologies for connecting applications to storage such as ten gigabit Ethernet (10GB-E), Infiniband (IB), and Internet SCSI (iSCSI).

The FC protocol is now being mutated into things like Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), where Fibre Channel is encapsulated over newer flavors of Ethernet called Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE). Offerings of FCoE are already available from the major switch vendors.

As storage vendors focus more on SAS, SATA and SSD, and the switch vendors focus on Ethernet convergence and movement to 40Gbit backbones and higher, it will be interesting to see if Fibre Channel maintains it's market share in the Enterprise storage space. 

The poor economy and the advent of Solid State Disks as a financially viable alternative to FC disks are driving the movement to these new lower cost alternatives. This trend towards lower cost alternatives is similar to how server virtualization is driving the server vendors towards new blade technology. SAS storage is "good enough" in many cases as a high performance tier one pool for most applications, and when SAS is not enough, virtualized SSD storage pools based on low cost flash memory can be used.

In the next few years, we will see even more convergence of SAN and NAS storage as companies begin to implement intelligent storage networks and place structured data on SSD or SAS, and migrate non-structured data to low cost deduplicated pools of SATA storage. The protocols being used to access data will become less important as data elements are treated more like objects rather than blocks or files.

The rapid movement to a cloud-based, virtualized world will further drive the importance of metadata for the objects being stored. The ability to maintain and leverage "data about data" will become more important as the location of objects becomes less important. Global file systems will be implemented to create policies for data movement and storage within the cloud.

As Fibre Channel becomes less important, does this mean all the switches, zoning, LUN security, and all the other aspects of a traditional SAN will become a thing of the past? Not really, all of that will be around for some time as the basic plumbing of the data center changes to the new paradigm. But smart storage professionals should make the effort to stay current with the new advances in technology so they don't get left behind when the paradigm does finally shift.

As I tell all my IT buddies, you should have become a doctor so you wouldn't have to study as much! The human body has been on version 1 for quite some time now.

Christopher Poelker is the author of Storage Area Networks for Dummies, and he is currently the vice president of Enterprise Solutions at FalconStor Software.