Tanaka says Woven and other switch and host adapter vendors have implemented a pre-standard versions of Qbb in order to address the limitations of the standards as well as current market demand. He says Woven plans to comply with the standard once it is complete but also extend beyond it.

Separately, Cisco is shipping pre-standard DCE technology on its products, such as the new Nexus 7000 and 5000 data center switches, DeSanti says. He says these features can be made standard compliant with a firmware upgrade once the standards are complete.

"Consensus has been achieved on what the mechanisms are and how they should behave," he says. "So it is already possible to have products that will become standard compliant, even if the standard is still in the phase of construction."

The Qau standard, however, is "ambitious" and may not be necessary for initial implementations of DCE, DeSanti says. Nonstandard implementations of congestion notification may suffice.

Force10, however, has no intentions of shipping pre-standard CEE technology even though the University of New Hampshire already conducted an FCoE interoperability "plugfest." The company plans to fully comply with the T11 and DCB standards once they are solid, Garrison says.

Mass market demand won't bubble up until then, Garrison says.

"There still could be some hiccups and bugs that get discovered that have to be addressed so that's why we're waiting," he says.

Apart from the standards efforts, CEE and DCE may raise some operational challenges, according to Chuck Hollis, EMC's global marketing CTO. Hollis notes convergence might disrupt the usual data center setup in which three different groups are responsible for operating three distinct networks.

It isn't clear who manages a converged fabric, Hollis says in a blog post on the EMC site.

"In terms of organizational responsibility, we've got an entirely new construct, don't we?" Hollis asks. "I mean, today we've got separate disciplines and largely linear workflows between the groups. What happens when we can put it all on one console? And even if we can do it, will people want it?"

Nonetheless, CEE and DCE vendors are encouraged that they've agreed on the technologies to be included in the standards, and that major hurdles to finalizing them -- acronyms notwithstanding -- have been stamped out.

"I don't see any show-stoppers here -- it's just time," says Force10's Garrison. "This is just another evolutionary step. [Ethernet] worked great for mundane or typical applications -- now we're getting to time-sensitive [applications] and we need to have a little bit more congestion control in there."

Senior Editor Jon Brodkin contributed to this story.