The analysis is on, looking back at 2009 and 2010 for what protocols and physical layer networking may be trending into next year. The folks over at Wikibon have set their gears turning on where storage networking will go and came out with a few predictions for us to chew on.

It looks like the newest contender, the protocol FCoE is making a big splash and will continue to do so next year:

FCoE is the new protocol on the block and is a good fit for enterprise customers (who are the users of FC today), so it gets a lot of coverage. Here’s what to expect with FCoE in 2011:

• Multi-hop configurations
• Additional storage vendors with native FCoE
• Full end-to-end Ethernet becomes possible (the VCE Coalition has the opportunity to offer the first turnkey solution once EMC native FCoE storage is baked into Vblock offerings)
• HP will support FCoE through its networking line (ToR and core switches – the A-Series), providing an alternative to Cisco and Brocade. It is expected that other Ethernet suppliers (Juniper, Arista, Force10, etc) will support DCB/CEE, but questionable if they will release an FCoE product.

For those not in the know. FCoE is an extension of Fibre Channel (FC) refers to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)—Ethernet is the current dominant networking solution (rolling out with 10Gb networks to slowly overtake 1Gb networks) and FC happens to be a good contender on the other side of the market. FCoE delivers extremely broad bandwidth with a lot of new technologies designed to bridge Fibre Channel and Ethernet networks.

They make the predictions based on sales of optical ports during 2009. While Ethernet clearly maintains network superiority, only a tiny portion of that protocol’s sales represent optical ports at 1.1m; whereas Fibre Channel, representing 1/8th of the total size of Ethernet, sold 1.74m optical ports. This looks to be a struggle between a small quad of extremely large companies with  Intel and Broadcom heading up the Ethernet side verses Emulex and QLogic on Fibre Channel.

Wikibon sees Fibre Channel over Ethernet as the rising star in the protocol war next year, but warns he’s not ready to call it “the year of FCoE.” He says, if FCoE manages to take 10% of the Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions market.