The price of embedded technologies will be significantly less than the external cards, but the cost differential between vendors is likely to be a tight race for the next few years. Intel is the top selling vendor for 10GbE, but there is significant competition for LOM design wins (see recent HP 10GB CNA Online shopping). Intel’s PR also talks about cloud and environmental impact – converged networking is a foundational technology for many cloud environments and the energy consumption of 10GbE technologies is getting better with every generation of technology, but all of these claims can also be made by the other competitors in the spaceWhen it comes to interoperability, Intel’s FCoE support information can be found here – it includes Windows and Linux, Cisco and Brocade switches and EMC (getting on EMC’s support matrix is a significant hurdle to clear) and NetApp arrays. That covers all of the currently shipping FCoE switches and 2 of the 3 native storage arrays vendors (Compellent is the third), but it is missing a big player for operating systems: VMware. Emulex and QLogic were relatively easy to support with VMware since the 10GB CNA delivers FC packets to the OS, just like a FC HBA. Software solutions like Open FCoE deliver Ethernet packets; today VMware’s hypervisor can not remove the header from the packet to deliver FC and the virtual switch is not lossless (see slide 17 of my 2010 EMC World presentation). VMware and Intel have been partners for a long time, so you can expect that this will be resolved some time in the future. The press release also mentioned Oracle and Dell, conspicuously absent are IBM and HP.