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Industry Trends and Perspectives: Converged Networking and IO Virtualization (IOV)

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageioblog.com/reports.

The trends that I am seeing with converged networking and I/O fall into a couple of categories. One being converged networking including unified communications, FCoE/DCB along with InfiniBand based discussions while the other being around I/O virtualization (IOV) including PCIe server based multi root IO virtualization (MRIOV).

As is often the case with new technologies the trend of some saying these are the next great things thus drop everything and adopt them now as they are working and ready for prime time mission critical deployment. Then there are those who say no, stop, do not waste your time on these as they are temporary, they will die and go away anyway. In between, there is reality which takes a bit of balancing the old with the new, look before you leap, do your homework, and do not be scared however have a strategy and a plan on how to achieve it.

Thus is FCoE a temporal or temporary technology? Well, in the scope that all technologies are temporary however it is their temporal timeframe that should be of interest. Thus given that FCoE will probably have at least a ten to fifteen year temporal timeline, I would say in technology terms it has a relative long life for supporting coexistence on the continued road to convergence which appears to be Ethernet.

Related and companion material:
Video: Storage and Networking Convergence
Blog: I/O Virtualization (IOV) Revisited
Blog: I/O, I/O, Its off to Virtual Work and VMworld I Go (or went)
Blog: EMC VPLEX: Virtual Storage Redefined or Respun?

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

greg