Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that FC isn't a more efficient protocol
than Ethernet -- in fact, I think I said as much already.

All I'm saying is that in the real world, 10Gb Ethernet NAS can perform as
well as 8Gb FC SAN.  There are trade-offs for everything.  An Ethernet
network can be cheaper and easier to manage, while an FC network can be
more efficient (which *may* perform better) and be more secure.

-Adam


On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 4:26 PM, Skylar Thompson
<[email protected]>wrote:

> On 04/05/2014 12:59 PM, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) wrote:
> >> From: [email protected] [mailto:discuss-
> >> [email protected]] On Behalf Of Adam Levin
> >>
> >> 2) It used to be the case that 1Gb Ethernet, even using LACP or other
> >> aggregation protocols, couldn't keep up with FC.  FC is a more efficient
> >> protocol than NFS.  However, now that we have 10Gb Ethernet, it's
> really no
> >> longer an issue.
> >
> > I disagree bigtime.  Even if you run iscsi over 10Ge, it still has to go
> through all the mac/ip/application layers, not to mention, the 10Ge switch,
> probably buffering, store and forward, etc.  If you have a network such as
> Infiniband or Fibre Channel, you're able to skip all those and use DMA
> directly, which greatly decreases latency.  Also, the speed of even the
> slowest IB network is around 40 Gbit, while ether maxes out at 10Gbit.
> >
> > Whether using SSD or HDD, the sustainable throughput of each individual
> device is around 1Gbit.  So the max performance of a 10Ge network is on-par
> with 10 disks.  Which would be a pathetically small SAN.
>
> Agreed. FC also has the benefit of preventing over-subscription of a
> channel by design - you might saturate a link but you won't experience
> dropped frames. FC channel aggregation blows the socks off LACP as well;
> the usage on each individual channel is far more uniform than with LACP
> since an incoming are sent to the first channel with available credits
> rather than using some arbitrary hashing algorithm.
>
> Skylar
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