Stacey Higginbotham launched a post today on GigaOm titled Next Up: I/O Virtualization? discussing options to consolidate Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand connections on a single link. It is great to see companies tackling the path management mess created by trying to jam 6 PCI cards in a 1U server.
We spent some time discussing I/O virtualization and virtual I/Os with Greg Schulz at The StorageIO Group and have our own post and short podcast at Defining Virtual I/O Acceleration.
But more importantly, this continued activity in the I/O virtualization arena triggers the following...
How the heck did we go from:
1. We have Ethernet to
2. We have Ethernet and Fibre Channel to
3. We have Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InifiniBand to
4. We can put everything back on 10Gig Ethernet.
Is it just me, or does this seem like we could have saved a few billion dollars over the last few years and skipped a couple of steps?
I know there were things Fibre Channel could do before 10Gig Ethernet came around. And I'm sure someone will be happy to point out the interconnect efficiencies of InfiniBand. But let's be honest with each other...haven't we all seen this movie again and again?
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