Do Falling 10GbE Prices Spell Doom for Fibre Channel?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Our favorite storage pundit Henry Newman writes that the days may be numbered Fiber Channel, the dominant data storage interconnect technology.

I have been tracking the prices of 4Gb and 8Gb Fibre Channel (FC) and 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) for more than a year, and just recently I have started to see what I have been expecting: Dramatic price drops in 10 GbE. The price drops started with NIC pricing, as that is the easiest and lowest-cost component to develop, store and ship. I believe that this price drop, combined with FCoE and other market forces, means the slow death of Fibre Channel has begun.