The storage war is on in the data center.  There are some early adopters of Fibre Channel over Ethernet, but Fibre Channel in native form still holds a commanding lead in the data center.  This is due in large part to existing fibre channel investments and the fact that this equipment is not fully depreciated.  Secondly, Fibre channel is higher speed than FCoE in currently shipping equipment with 16Gb/s versus 10Gb/s respectively.

There is also talk of flattening networks for optimal performance in a FCoE environment.  Flat fabrics will certainly operate faster (wire speed faster to be exact), but may not be feasible for data centers that have recent investments in a more hierarchical layer 3 configuration.

Another hurdle to FCoE adoption is that the current CNAs (Converged Network Adapters) are higher power than the Ethernet and SAN adapters together.  Granted it isn’t by much, but it is still measurable.

When implementing the FCoE protocol, the line between the storage team and network teams dissolve and equipment must be shared between teams.  Administratively, this can create issues with responsibility.

So will FCoE become viable in the near future?  Time will tell.