In most cases, the best option for organizations is to stick with the network protocol they already use, said Russ Fellows, senior partner and analyst at Evaluator Group.”You don’t have to change,” Fellows said. “There are multiple choices for NVMe over something. If you love Ethernet and are all in on Ethernet, then RoCE version 2 probably will work fine. Stay on that path. If you’re a big fan of Fibre Channel, NVMe over Fibre Channel will work fine, so follow that path. Same with InfiniBand. The last thing people want to do is make a wholesale swap. Use whatever protocol you like, and whatever you’re most comfortable with.”
Brocade is following the same Fibre Channel path for NVMe as it does for other Fibre Channel protocols, such as Fibre Channel Protocol for SCSI drives and FICON for mainframes.
“The dirty secret is, there’s virtually nothing new here” in the Brocade launch, Fellows said. “Even Gen 5 switching supports NVMe. And that’s good for end users because you don’t have to go switching out a whole bunch of gear for NVMe.
