Falling 10GbE Prices Spell Doom for Fibre Channel

[ Thanks to Paul Shread for this link. ]

"In the early part of this decade, there was a movement called FibreOn. The idea was to increase the market for Fibre Channel by putting Fibre Channel chipsets on higher-end motherboards. The plan failed miserably for reasons that I think are pretty clear.

"First, SATA drives became denser than Fibre Channel drives, their reliability increased, and their cost dropped compared to Fibre Channel drives.

"Secondly, Fibre Channel chipsets were expensive, and vendors such as Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and HP/Compaq (NYSE: HPQ) had a chicken-and-egg sales and marketing scenario. Since margins on PCs were slim, building and designing a board with Fibre Channel chips and plug-in SFPs would be a relatively high cost, so there had to be a market for them, which never materialized, in part because there wasn't much in the way of products. So FibreOn failed, and during this time vendors started to add 1Gb Ethernet to their boards."

Complete Story

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