FCoE: I’m not Dead! Arista: You’ll Be Stone Dead in a Moment!

I was at Arista on Friday for Tech Field Day 8, and when FCoE was brought up (always a good way to get a lively discussion going), Andre Pech from Arista (who did a fantastic job as a presenter) brought up an article written by Douglas Gourlay, another Arista employee, entitled “Why FCoE is Dead, But Not Buried Yet“.

FCoE: “I feel happy!”

It’s an interesting article, because much of the player-hating seems to directed at TRILL, not FCoE, and as J Metz has said time and time again, you don’t need TRILL to do FCoE if you do FCoE the way Cisco does (by using Fibre Channel Forwarders in each FCoE switch). Arista, not having any Fibre Channel skills, can’t do it this way. If they were to do FCoE, Arista (like Juniper) would need to do it the sparse-mode/FIP-snooping FCoE way, which would need a non-STP way of handling multi-pathing such as TRILL or SPB.

Jayshree Ullal, The CEO of Arista, hated on TRILL and spoke highly of VXLAN and NVGRE (Arista is on the standards body for both). I think part of that is that like Cisco, not all of their switches will be able to support TRILL, since TRILL requires new Ethernet silicon.

Even the CEO of Arista acknowledged that FCoE worked great at the edge, where you plug a server with a FCoE CNA into an FCoE switch, and the traffic is sent along to native Ethernet and native Fibre Channel networks from there (what I call single-hop or no-hop FCoE). This doesn’t require any additional FCoE infrastructure in your environment, just the edge switch. The Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects are a great example of this no-hop architecture.

I don’t think FCoE is quite dead, but I have to imagine that it’s not going as well as vendors like Cisco have hoped. At least, it’s not been the success that some vendors have imagined. And I think there are two major contributors to FCoE’s failure to launch, and both of those reasons are more Layer 8 than Layer 2.

Old Man of the Data Center

Reason number one is also the reason why we won’t see TRILL/Fabric Path deployed widely: It’s this guy:

Don’t let him trap you into hearing him tell stories about being a FDDI bridge, whatever FDDI is

The Catalyst 6500 series switch. This is “The Old Man of the Data Center”. And he’s everywhere. The switch is a bit long in the tooth, and although capacity is much higher on the Nexus 7000s (and even the 5000s in some cases), the Catalyst 6500 still has a huge install base.

And it won’t ever do FCoE.

And it (probably) won’t ever do TRILL/Fabric Path (spanning-tree fo-evah!)

The 6500s aren’t getting replaced in significant numbers from what I can see. Especially with the release of the Sup 2T supervisor for the 6500es, the 6500s aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. I can only speculate as to why Cisco is pursuing the 6500 so much, but I think it comes down to two reasons:

• The idea of “Don’t let the customer replace the chassis, lest they replace it with a competitor“
• Cisco is afraid of eating its young. Apple is the opposite, love ’em or hate ’em, they weren’t afraid to cannibalize a highly lucrative and profitable business (iPods) with an unproven (but now proven) product (iPhone). Cisco doesn’t have the guts to cannibalize the 6500 sales.

Premature FCoE

So reason number two? I think Cisco jumped the gun. They’ve been pushing FCoE for a while, but they weren’t quite ready. It wasn’t until July 2011 that Cisco released NX-OS 5.2, which is what’s required to do multi-hop FCoE in the Nexus 7000s and MDS 9000. They’ve had the ability to do multi-hop FCoE in the Nexus 5000s for a bit longer, but not much. Yet they’ve been talking about multi-hop for longer than it was possible to actually implement. Cisco has had a multi-hop FCoE reference architecture posted since March 2011 on their website, showing a beautifully designed multi-hop FCoE network with 5000s, 7000s, and MDS 9000s, that for months wasn’t possible to implement. Even today, if you wanted to implement multi-hop FCoE with Cisco gear (or anyone else), you’d be a very, very early adopter.

So no, I don’t think FCoE is dead. No-hop FCoE is certainly successful (even Arista’s CEO acknowedged as such), and I don’t think even multi-hop FCoE is dead, but it certainly hasn’t caught on (yet). Will multi-hop FCoE catch on? I’m not sure. We’ll have to see.