At this week’s EMC World 2014 Conference being held in Las Vegas, SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE welcomed Jack Rondoni, Vice President of Data Center Storage and Solutions for Brocade. Co-hosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman discussed the role Fibre Channel will continue to play with the Enterprise as well as Brocade’s integration in EMC products like ViPR.

Right out of the gate, Vellante asked Rondoni if Fibre Channel, the high-speed network technology used for connecting computer data storage, was dead.

“I can show you how people keep saying that Fibre Channel is dead,” Rondoni offered. “But I can also show you how it keeps growing year after year. That conversation is over. We need to move on.”

In his experience with the Wikibon community, Vellante noted that there are clearly what he refers to as ‘Fibre Channel bigots’. “They won’t move and it’s about trust,” he stated.

“If you look at how Fibre Channel was created at the beginning,” stated Rondoni, “it was purpose built. Ethernet evolved as being general purpose. Fibre Channel was built for storage.” That purpose built ethos of Fibre Channel is, according to Rondoni, foundational for the Enterprise. “The built in resiliency means that Enterprise won’t abandon it.”

One reason, believes Miniman, that Fibre Channel continues to maintain traction is due to the fact that both Fibre Channel and Ethernet pricing have balanced out. “It’s a wash,” he said. He then asked Rondoni to discuss the differences between storage networking and networking in general.

“In the end, we all interconnect. There are a lot of similarities,” Rondoni said. “Fiber Channel is about delivering performance workloads at scale. If you think about that and what EMC is talking about, the notion of having networks that can deliver at that level is far more interesting, irrespective of protocol.” This, he claims, has made the discussion around the importance of the network a far more interesting conversation, of late.

Continuing this stream of thought, Rondoni said, “I think people that come to this show who have maybe deployed storage networking understand the importance of this. It’s very exciting.” He sees this discussion as remaining important at subsequent EMC World conferences going forward.

Noting their presence at this year’s conference, Miniman pointed out that Brocade is everywhere. “What’s new for Brocade in the coming year,” he asked.

“I think what’s near and dear is our advanced integration we are doing with ViPR,” stated Rondoni. “We have been there since the beginning. As they announced the new version, we are expanding that. The advancements EMC is extending, that’s exciting for us because that is a new market and new regions and expanding economies.”

While earlier in the conversation Rondoni had extolled the virtues of Fibre Channel, he explained that as Brocade expands into those new regions and economies, they expect to operate as protocol agnostic. “We care about delivering networks that are purpose built regardless of protocol,” he stated. Their vision is to be the Data Center Networking provider of choice.

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