[holowoodman]

Fibrechannel is far too expensive, you need expensive switches, cables/transceivers and cards in addition to the Ethernet you'll need anyways. And this Fibrechannel hardware is quite limited in what you can do with it, by far not as capable as the usual Ethernet/IP stuff with regards to routing, encryption, tunneling, filtering and what not.

Similar things are happening with stuff like Infiniband, it has become far too expensive and Ethernet/ROCE is making inroads in lower- to medium-end installations. Availability is also an issue, Nvidia is the only Infiniband vendor left.

[UltraSane]

Is there a fundamental reason why FC is more expensive than Ethernet?

[convolvatron]

since its entire reason to exist was to effect an artificial market segmentation, I guess the answer is .. yes?

[UltraSane]

It isn't an artificial market segmentation. Fibre Channel is a no compromise technology with a single purpose, to connect servers to remote storage with performance and reliability close to directly attached storage, and it does that really, REALLY well. It is by far the single most bullet proof technology I have ever used. In a parallel universe where FC won over ethernet and every Ethernet port in the world was an FC port I don't see why it would be any more expensive that ethernet.

[bluGill]

there is ip over fiber channel. no need for separate ethernet. At least in theory, in practice I'm sure if anyone implemented enough parts to make it useful but the spec exists.

[UltraSane]

No. When I heard about Cisco having FC over Ethernet for their UCS servers I was grossed out because of how Ethernet is a L2 protocol that can't handle multi-path without ugly hacks like Virtual Port Channel and discovered that there is no real support for IP over Fiber Channel. There is a wikipedia page for IPFC but it seems to be completely dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPFC