Thank you for your comment; you bring up a great point that iSCSI could benefit from the same advanced networking features required by FCoE.

I think that the challenge comes back to cost. If these features can be implemented cost effectively then they will be relevant to iSCSI. If a substantial premium is charged versus vanilla 10 GigE then I thing that most iSCSI users with stick with standard 10 GigE as a “good enough” solution.

An interesting twist to the storey could lie in the fact that iSCSI can also benefit from many of the enhancements in Enhanced Ethernet. For example, Priority based Flow Control (802.3Qbb) and Enhanced Transmission Selection (802.1Qaz).

My understanding is that it is possible, for example, to give iSCSI frames, obviously encapsulated in IPv4 frames as normal, a high priority meaning that iSCSI can benefit from lossless behaviour………….. up to a point. I say “up to a point”, because if iSCSI were to co-exist with FCoE or any other traffic type that required higher priority, it would have to sit lower down the pecking order and be more likely to have PAUSE conditions inflicted. E.g. If FCoE and iSCSI were operating on the same unified fabric and the fabric started to experience congestion, FCoE would be given a higher priority than iSCSI, BUT iSCSI could still have a higher priority than other traffic types. Hope Im making sense.

Of course, if iSCSI were also running over Enhanced Ethernet, it would benefit from the better physical aspects too including higher rated cabling and hardware meaning less packets drops for other reasons etc.

Just my penny’s worth.