While reading an article about Brocade/Foundry’s product plans, I learned about Convergent Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), also known as “Data Center Ethernet”. As if Ethernet needed blessing from the price-gouging storage vendor community to enter the data center…

CEE sounds like just one more in a long line of failed “standards” like IsoENET that take Ethernet, find some supposed nit to pick with it, and add all sorts of baggage to address hypothetical requirements. In the case of IsoENET, it was jitter, and in the case of CEE, it is packet loss, never mind that function belongs to TCP at layer 4, not Ethernet at layer 2. It is a predictable result of the Fibre Channel community’s lame attempts to head off iSCSI by putting FCP directly over Ethernet (FCoE).

This basically reflects an attitude of “my traffic is so special, it can’t be allowed to mingle with unwashed Ethernet packets”, and reminds me of how France Telecom Labs circa 1996 was very proud to show a prototype of “World Wide Web without requiring the use of IP”, as if the fact the web uses IP rather than ATM was a barrier to adoption, rather than a success factor…

The reason why Ethernet is so phenomenally successful is that it is simple, easy to implement and cheap. Any attempts to add complexity will only delay time to market, limit economies of scale and add cost, until whatever comes out becomes just as expensive as the Fibre Channel ports and adapters the whole world is trying to ditch in favor of fast, inexpensive vanilla Ethernet. Then again vendors like Brocade grew fat on gouging Fibre Channel customers and hope they can reverse the trend of commodification and keep on with their little racket.

It’s just not going to happen, specially in a tough economic environment where IT expenditures are contracting and any attempt by vendors to foist their overpriced proprietary dead-end marketectures will be treated harshly by buyers.