Although I/O Virtualization and FCoE both have similar aims in reducing the cost base of data centers, they are complementary — or perhaps orthogonal — to each other. I/O Virtualization focuses on maximizing the value of the expensive high performance I/O adapters associated with enterprise servers (be it 10GbE, FCoE, SAS/SATA RAID, FC or other) while FCoE aims to eliminate the FC infrastructure by unifying the storage and networking interconnect into a single 10G Ethernet fabric. Since FCoE requires 10G Ethernet (with the DCB extensions in both the NICs and the switches), it is likely to remain an expensive "enterprise-class" interconnect for the foreseeable future. In fact the adoption of I/O Virtualization in server systems may lower the barrier to adoption for FCoE (and 10GbE in general) by amortizing the cost of the 10G ports over multiple servers, bring it to a much wider (higher volume) market than would otherwise be the case.
