== Rethinking my views of Fibrechannel

The more I look at Fibrechannel's [[competitors
../tech/FCvsiSCSIvsAOE]], the more attractive Fibrechannel looks. After
all, FC's only real problem is that it costs a lot of money, and even
that may be changing as FC vendors come to their senses; we recently
got a quite reasonable quote from a storage vendor.

(Well, FC switch vendors are still insane, but if you are willing to
go for second-hand equipment you can apparently get 1 and 2 gigabit FC
switches for quite cheap as people upgrade to 4G.)

Admittedly, I might not feel this way if we didn't already have a
FC-based SAN that has been solidly reliable and performs well. That
gives me certain biases, especially when I have been in the grimy depths
of equipment evaluations.

(Also, we can't just continue our existing FC SAN; we need to move
from our highly customized Solaris 8 on SPARC setup to Solaris 10
on x86.)