As the FCoE standard moves closer to completion, companies are beginning to make product announcements. The most interesting development so far is not the announcements by the expected players such as Qlogic and Emulex, but also the stated lack of support by Microsoft.  Both Qlogic and Emulex are trying to maintain their duopoly in the FC HBA market by introducing combo FC and FCoE Ethernet CNAs- converged network adapters.  Both vendors products are expected to integrate seamlessly into existing SAN infrastructures.

But FCoE does not require a dedicated HBA like Fibre Channel.  FCoE uses Ethernet and can be enabled with a software driver.  This raises the question of performance, but with the abundance of processing available from multi-core processors, performance should not be an issue for FCoE initiators.  Dedicated FCoE targets (when available) may use hardware HBAs.

There is a good chance that the FCoE HBA market may go the way of the iSCSI CNIC market- software from Microsoft and Intel (via the Linux openFCoE project) for most initiators using standard Ethernet NICs with hardware FCoE NICs used only for targets.  This will make it tough on the HBA vendors- The target HBA volume is a fraction of the initiator HBA market.