Hey, Robert:
I do, actually, but I was afraid of violating Cisco's NetPro Forum rules by specifying a particular vendor and their solution. But if its OK, the company I am thinking about is Xsigo. I'm only mentioning them because I would like to hear the opinions of those who know about their IO consolidation approach and who also know about FCoE and can discuss both of them.
I think it would be beneficial to have a discussion about the merits of their solution - or lack thereof - from a pure engineering perspective. No marketing, no company loyalty, etc. I do know you work for Cisco, so I will consider that, too.
It's a different approach to IO consolidation from FCoE. The Xsigo solution does not offer fabric unification. It offers IO consolidation, centralized management of IO, MR-IOV (or something along those lines) and a robust set of tools to manage and maintain a virtualized environment. It also makes provisioning and deploying of server IO resources much simpler -- or so it seems. I cant say for sure because I am still learning about it.
But in the end, the goal is not a converged fabric. However, since fabric unification - at this point in the technology's development - is limited to the server edge (ie, ToR), the two solutions are comparable, since the Xsigo approach also presents both Ethernet and FC ports at the ToR.
They have some white papers which can be found here:
http://www.xsigo.com/resource_center/resource_center/index.php
