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Comment by itsjustjoe | Hacker News Reader

FCoE (fibre channel over ethernet) was similar. Not only was it an amalgamation of arguably incompatible standards, but it was an unusual use case. If you needed data security / reliability, etc you could go FC. If you needed a cheap data protocol you could go iSCSI.

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FCoE was (and may still be) pushed heavily by Cisco. It was neat, being able to have your Cisco UCS devices talk to both Fibre Channel NetApp and Ethernet all on the same link.

It worked fairly well once it was up and running, and you set the QoS correctly so that FC traffic won out over Ethernet because Fiber Channel does NOT tolerate drops very well.

Cisco's FC solutions were always a weird effort to merge their own IP tech in here or there and it just always felt half thought through to me.

Bugs... so many bugs in the various pieces. But I can say it was fairly rock solid once it was up and running.

Yeah Cisco's FC products were pretty buggy. I preferred Brocade.

FC is solid generally once you've got it running, the protocol kinda ensures that.

Yeah FCoE could be wonky. It was a pipe dream that was a no win balancing act.

I worked with some FCIP and given the right case and planning, that could work, within the right context.

It was a cool idea in theory. One cable for everything! And then you realize that you still have to worry about power, KVM (or a dedicated IPMI), and any other potential add ons. Emulex worked on getting their chips as on board NICs, which would have been neat for that, but honestly the performance and lack of upgradability couldn't compete with add-on cards.

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