[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 14, Issue 63

[Tim Bradshaw]

Less than ten years ago I wrote a big rant at people where I worked about fibre channel: all our machines had two entirely different networks attached to them: one built on ethernet which was at that point all Gb on new machines and 10Gb on some (I don't think that 10Gb switches were really available yet though) & where you could stuff a machine with interfaces for the cost of a good meal, and where everything just talked to everything else ... and one built on fibre channel which might have been 2Gb, where an interface cost as much as a car, and where interoperability involved weeks pissing around with firmware in the cards, and sometimes just buying new ones.  Fibre channel was just laughably worse than ethernet.

No one listened, of course, because my political skills are akin to those of a goat, and fibre channel is *storage* which is completely different than networking, somehow.

Perhaps people still use fibre channel.

> On 16 Jan 2017, at 16:44, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> I held up the two cards, disclosed the cost, and said "this ATM card is
> always going to be expensive but the ethernet card is gonna be $10 in
> a year or two.  Why?  Volume.  Every computer has ethernet, it's gonna
> do nothing but get cheaper.  And you're gonna see ethernet over fiber,
> long haul, you're going to see 100 Mbit, gigabit ethernet, and it's
> going to be cheap.  ATM is going nowhere."