All roads now lead to the Storage Networking World 2011 (SNW) in Santa Clara Convention Center, California. Industry heavyweights are expected to grace the stage in this year’s event with Randy Mott of HP, Steve Wozniak of Fusion-O, Jack Domme of Hitachi Data Systems and Dr. Krishna Nathan of IBM. But at press time, FCoE is stealing the show at the world’s premier storage, data center and information technology infrastructure conference.

In an interview at SNW, FCIA Secretary Greg McSorley expressed excitement on the new partnership saying, “The FCIA is proud to join forces with storage networking leaders in FCoE and 8GFC. Today’s demonstration shows that Fibre Channel technologies continue to provide IT organizations the assurance that they have the most proven, most widely adopted, highest performance storage technology in the market today.”

Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) has just showcased 8GFC and FCoE solutions that prompted vendors to convene and discuss major developments within the Fibre Channel and FCoE Technology. Who would have thought that after a report saying that FCoE is struggling to gain traction, it will grab interests among the industry leaders. Experts believed that Cisco tapping FCoE to reboot its datacenter fabric and creating a comprehensive update that brings end-to-end Fibre Channel over Ethernet connectivity to the networking company’s core switching and storage-switching portfolio.

Cisco recently announced some major switch updates in its server product lines, the upgrades taking significant steps forward in converged networking (FCoE) solutions.  For some background, Ed Buignon of Cisco dropped by The Cube provides his unique perspective on virtualization (see below). This move was to pump up Cisco’s goal in making a remarkable impact across cloud and changing world of data. This was furthered discussed by James Urquhart of Cisco during the Strata Conference on Big Data (see Part I and Part II).