How expensive are fibre channel storage networks?

Hi Elisa. Fiber Channel will always be more costly. The switches can be very expensive.
If you currently have a bunch of servers with locally attached disks, changing to some sort of networked storage offers benefts:

(1) Your disks are enclosed in a "highly available cabinet" with redundant data paths, redundant power supplies, redundant controllers and redundant disks (RAID).
Realize that not all disks are created equal; FC and SCSI disks are faster, 10 times less prone to suffer unrecoverable errors (your data can be lost) but cost more & store less per disk that ATA technology disks.

(2) Unused disk space can be shared by all hosts connected to the storage, and the included "Logical Volume Manager" can allocate disk space in chunks much smaller that a physical disk

(3) Data can be replicated to other disk storage devices at remote locations to offer data protection from localized disasters such as flood, hurricanes.

I am fairly confident that someone in the company you work for assumes that your company's data is being protected in a manner appropriate for the importance of your data. You may also be subject to regulatory rules on how your data is protected.
It is highly likely that the VAR you normally deal with for your other needs can help you pick appropriate storage for your application. I trust the integrity of VAR's.

For the most part, Fiber Channel storage networks offer higher performance than iSCSI or NAS.

Some storage manufacturer's offer a single "box of disks" that can use Fiber Channel, iSCSI, and NAS all at the same time.

If you need tape for backup, I am unaware of any mainstream tape library that uses ethernet. Usually Tape Library's only require 2-4 FC connections and these can be direct-connected to your backup server w/o any SAN switches.

The fibre channel is always a a safe investment but is much more expensive.
You can compare fibre channel price whith 10GB ethernet and determine your requirements.

If you can use the same network to carry both network and storage traffic you can look about FCOE.

Too Expensive! Ethernet SAN provides a significant price/performance over FC or iSCSI. See ESG report highlights below:

ESG Lab Validation Highlights
 ESG Lab configured, provisioned, and was utilizing Coraid storage in less than two minutes from power on.
 The SRX3500 demonstrated the ability to support thousands of Exchange users using just 12 SAS drives.
 Coraid EtherDrive SAN was able to drive more than 1200MB/sec from a single appliance, enough to stream 2,560 broadcast quality video streams simultaneously.
 Commodity hardware and cost-efficient AoE connectivity enable a cost of acquisition far less than Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and even DAS.
 Coraid proved well-suited to virtualized environments, providing simple to provision SAN storage that looks to a VMware cluster like direct attached disk.
 The EMX Mirroring appliance provided synchronous data protection for volumes across shelves with no disruption to service.
 ESG Lab was able to remove drives that were actively being accessed and move them to a different chassis with only a momentary pause in IO and no errors.

ESG Lab found that the Coraid EtherDrive SAN storage system delivers shockingly simple deployment and management, with complete functionality delivered via a handful of easy to use commands and rock solid Ethernet SAN connectivity delivered via the extremely lightweight AoE protocol. The ease of management, deep scalability, and performance required for bandwidth-intensive scale-out applications are seamlessly extended to VMware environments as well.

ESG Lab testing has confirmed that Coraid’s architecture provides consistent levels of throughput—even during hardware faults. Sustained throughput in excess of 1,200 MB/sec was observed for large block sequential reads. Cost-efficiency was impressive, with acquisition costs as low as 20% of the costs of traditional SAN attached storage. ESG Lab also verified a very interesting recoverability and resiliency feature, whereby drives can be moved to a spare chassis while an application is running.

With EtherDrive SAN storage, Coraid has dramatically simplified storage for consolidated and virtualized environments while enhancing performance and providing incredible cost efficiency. While the speeds and feeds are impressive, ESG Lab is most impressed by the shocking simplicity of both the AoE protocol and the Coraid architecture, making management of petabytes a reasonable task. If your organization is struggling to keep up with exponential data growth while providing ever higher levels of performance and availability, ESG Lab recommends that you consider Coraid EtherDrive SAN storage as the foundation for your virtualized data center.

If you're building the SAN environment from scratch, avoid FC (unless you're a financial customer).

Go with iSCSI or AoE. It's much cheaper, no need for separate fibre-optics based network. Like ESG Labs mentioned, I'd recommend CORAID with their ATA over Ethernet too. AoE protocol has some advantages over iSCSI when speaking of payload (AoE needs much less offloading than iSCSI or FC).

Hi Elisa,
FC is a solid and reliable technology. Adoption is more related to the kind of SAN you're going to build. If you plan to use a storage array to consolidate data on your servers, you need a FC technology for sure. However, you have to identify the throughput you expect from storage array and from servers. I'd say that if you plan to replace internal disks for web, mail or sharepoint servers, iSCSI technology is usually sufficient. If you have database servers, applications servers, ERP or systems that provide frequent or consistent I/O access to disks, you must consider FC. FC might be more conveniently implemented using FCoE, that will benefit your servers with 10GE interfaces that will be shared for FC and Ethernet traffic flows.
Since you mention ATM, are you looking to provide SAN access over wan?

This is an interesting debate and one that takes siginificant importance with the emergence of FCoE. I have also been of the opiniion that FC is expensive and difficult to manage. In the last few months I've started to change my opinion as I read more on the subject, hence how I ended up on this discussion. I recently was forwarded a webinar that was given by Storage blogger Archie Hendryx where the discussion was around FC under utilisation and making it more cost effective (http://info.virtualinstruments.com/webinar-fc-san-myths.html) and have also read a recent gartner report that shows how FC is still going strong in the market. These and other resources seem to point to the idea that FC is not expensive if deployed and managed correctly. FC is still the protocol of choice for enterprises and dare i say it, rightly so!

--"FC is still the protocol of choice for enterprises and dare i say it, rightly so!"

This has as much to do with its ongoing capabilities as with existing investments. And organization that has been using SANs for 5-10 years will like have a FC SAN because that was the unquestioned leader of the time. So, the question of what to invest in today is going to be tempered by the existing investment, and rightfully so.

However, organizations getting into the SAN game today are more likely to go with iSCSI or a hybrid SAN that can support both FC and iSCSI, so that the costs of FC can be reserved for only the most demanding of applications.

iSCSI is far less expensive to maintain and deploy, and can support the vast majority of SAN workloads that most organizations will face.

FC is not going to go away anytime soon, but it's performance advantages have been significantly diminished, especially in light of 10GbE iSCSI.