This alphabet soup only looks to get more muddled and acronym-laden as enterprises try extend storage networks across the wide area with Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), some form of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), or Sonet/SDH.
Are storage customers really going to put up with this kind of complexity? Or will they simply choose not to afford it? We won't know for at least a year, since that's when the first FCoE products are forecast to hit the streets.
Maybe Brocade has the answer in its new DCX backbone switch, essentially a chassis for whatever network type or storage protocol you want to blend. All yours from Sun, starting at $179,000. Ouch.
You want lots of encapsulation, translation, and protocol conversions in your storage networks? That's fine, the vendors appear to be saying. Just as long as you're prepared to pay.