Posted July 13th, 2010 by Don Wake
Recently we stopped by the Dell facility in Oklahoma City, OK and had some great food and conversation with the Dell teams there. The BBQ was fantastic as was the conversation. We set up our booth along with several other Dell partners also in town for a Vendor Day. Among the partners attending were Vizioncore, VMware, Emulex, Eaton, Avocent and Watchguard.
Pictured to the right is Wes Reynolds, the Dell OEM Sales Manager. Wes and I are a traveling road show and we had a great time handling lots of questions from Dell TSRs and ISRs about our new OneConnect 10 GbE Converged Networking Adapters and our screaming fast Iron Man of HBAs the 8 Gb/s LPe12002.
One conversation started with “I’m glad you guys stopped by, I was just working with a customer that needed a 10 gig solution…” what a great ice breaker! If you hadn’t heard, Dell is launching with several OEM certified and Dell Branded 10 GbE products from Emulex.
Dell sells a lot of servers into highly complex data centers that are looking to save on power and cooling and space. All of that adds up to using less to do more. Dell can now offer its customers a single solution to handle all protocols in a single adapter architecture. Continue reading…
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Posted June 18th, 2010 by Don Wake
I turned on my TV and changed to a sports channel to watch the latest World Cup action going on in South Africa. The game had not started yet and I was wondering what that bizarre buzzing sound was. I asked my wife, “Do you hear that? Is something wrong with the TV reception? Maybe there is a crossed wire on the stereo speakers?”
Well it turns out that the noise is just the sound of South Africa cheering the World Cup. It is called a “Vuvuzela” and everyone except the South Africans are being driven crazy by it!
There is of course the other big story – U.S.A. ties with England. The goal keeper for England had butter fingers and what appeared to be an easy block turned into an “equalizer”. But I think it was more than just a goal keeper error – I think Mr. Green’s brains were liquefied by the deafening monotonous hum of the Vuvuzelas. Did you know they can cause hearing damage and Germany is going to ban them from viewings of the World Cup in public places? Continue reading…
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Posted June 11th, 2010 by Don Wake
I love super hero movies. I even have a modest collection of comic books (Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man series and the Image Spawn series). I was inspired to talk about HBAs today in the spirit of a comic strip. As you can see my drawing skills are quite awesome.
I think I can rule out a job working for Todd on comics, but anyway as “Captain LightPulse” explained to Iron Man here in episode 1, I’ve got some great information for you about the Fibre Channel products available to Dell from us. I hope to get you the reader a tad more excited about 8Gb/s than my version of the Iron Man character seems to be.
LightPulse 8 Gb/s HBAs
Now more than ever Dell customers are looking for ways to improve the efficiency of their data centers and stay under budget. Emulex LightPulse HBAs help IT department to run clean, green, fast and lean! The 8Gb/s LightPulse line of HBA’s include Dell model Numbers LPe12000-E, LPe12002-E and the Dell Mezzanine adapter LPe1205-M. Continue reading…
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Posted May 28th, 2010 by Don Wake
I was given access to the Scalent Server Migration Utility – Windows Edition (SMU) recently so I put it to work in our lab with a Dell R805 PowerEdge rack server with an Emulex LPe12002-E dual ported 8 gig Fibre Channel adapter. My goal was to enable my server to boot from SAN and see how the SMU helps me do this.
Scalent’s SMU utility is designed to help a user copy a server workload (the Operating System and Applications) out to a Storage Area Network quickly and simply. When you use the Scalent SMU in conjunction with our Emulex LPe12000 series of 8 Gbps HBAs – The Iron Man of HBAs it couldn’t be simpler. Emulex strives to make data center management easier than ever with our OneCommand Manager – a free piece of software that allows you to manage your HBAs and CNAs all in one graphical environment. Continue reading…
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Posted May 13th, 2010 by Don Wake
Hi Y’all! I’ve now been through ½ a dozen in depth technical sessions led by various EMC and VMWare experts. This has been an action packed event in a nerdy heavily caffeinated sort of way. I’ve taken full advantage of the free espresso here in the Bloggers Lounge (thank you www.razorfish.com). Espresso is essential geek fuel.
After amping up on coffee and filling my brainpan with all things SAN and Cloud and Virtualization I had to swing buy the booths. Emulex has been streaming traffic through our booth number 340 on the EMC World Solutions Pavilion floor. If you haven’t stopped by you really should “Spin the Warrior Wheel of Fortune” and win a fabulous prize! We are talking about our OneSecure HBA encryption products and there is also a great demo of PowerPath, OneSecure and RSA. The CPU utilization gain using our hardware based encryption versus a software based solution with a standard Emulex HBA should get your attention. Continue reading…
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Posted May 11th, 2010 by Don Wake
Frenetic. I like that word. It describes how I feel right now after landing in Boston, MA last night at 5 p.m. I walk a few miles inside the airport to the hotel “connected” to the airport. Called the wife and we did a conference call to wish mom a happy Mother’s Day. Then did a Skype session with the wife and we argued over the best way for me to go from the Boston airport to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC). Found www.mbta.com online and did a search on the Boston rail system. That provided me a subway route that would have taken 45 minutes. Then I thought “Wait a minute I chose this hotel because it’s less than 2 miles from the convention center!”
So I hung up/shutdown the computer and talked to someone IRL (in real life) – the Bell Captain at the front desk. I asked about the subway ride and he just smiled and asked me in a very Bostonian accent and attitude (which I loved) why I thought I should take a subway? After I acknowledged I don’t know how to use the internet he pointed me to Terminal A at the airport to catch the Silver Line bus and after a $2.00 15 minute bus ride I was on my way to the BCEC. Continue reading…
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Posted April 22nd, 2010 by Don Wake
Hello! Thought I would share my experiences with you about my trip to beautiful Orlando, Florida for SNW USA 2010. Emulex, a gold sponsor of the event kicked it off with an awesome booth right up front next to Dell. I stopped by the Dell booth to say hi. I really wanted to enter to win that Dell Mini they were giving away. 
Cool booth
Emulex setup a 40+ inch flat panel monitor so we could demonstrate our HBA and CNA products. My voice was hoarse after the first day of talking for about 6 hours straight. I was very pleased to meet so many Dell users. Many folks stopped by and described themselves as long time Emulex adapter customers with Dell servers and storage.
Continue reading…
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Posted April 15th, 2010 by Don Wake
Greetings! The other day Wes Reynolds and I were talking about how our customers are really starting to enjoy the benefits of our Universal Converged Network Adapters. One of our customers needed to have something that the competition simply couldn’t provide – flexibility. The customer it turns out would like to have as many options as possible so they can decide how best to support their users in the data center.
One Stop Shopping
Here on the Dellblog we have discussed our converged network adaptor a bunch and recently we posted an article about the general connectivity options a user has when they purchase our CNA. That article was more of a “how to” type of tech doc, but I didn’t really highlight what our customers already know; you can connect to our CNA in several ways without making separate purchases. In other words the OneConnect architecture offers our customers one stop shopping not only for converged protocols but also in terms of options for connecting to the CNA itself. Continue reading…
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Posted April 8th, 2010 by Don Wake
Hello again. Thanks for stopping by the Emulex Dell Blog. I’ve been mingling about in our little converging community of network and storage ninjas and pontificating on the awesomness of FCoE+NIC, in the Dell world.
As much as we vendor guys like to think the world revolves around us and our various Marketing Mantras (I love Shaun) I keep having the same conversation with many folks as we spread the word. What is this CNA thing? What do you mean FCoE and NIC? Can you do both at the same time on the same wire? Really?
I hear that a picture is worth a 1000 words so a little 5 minute video at 60 frames per second adds up to umm, brain cramp here… 60 seconds * 5 minutes = 300 seconds * 60 frames per second = 18,000 frames so that is like 18,000 pictures. So I figure the below video is worth 18,000 x 1000 words so I just wrote 18 millions words. So I don’t need to blog the rest of the year…right? Continue reading…
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Posted March 18th, 2010 by Don Wake
The Emulex Converged Network Adapter offers the “convergence” of multiple protocols into one adapter. Whether that be an FCoE+NIC or an iSCSI+NIC personality CNA is up to the customer’s needs. This convergence is only possible because of the advent of 10 Gbps Ethernet and the enhancement of Ethernet to allow for flow control that is lossless and can then carry the Fibre Channel protocol. That is called Converged Enhanced Ethernet or some folks call it Data Center Bridging. I call it pretty neato.
Well all that is great, but it also means you need a new kind of laser to generate this 10Gbps signal, and so you need a new kind of transmitter and receiver (transceiver) to put that laser onto an optical or (converted to an electrical signal) onto a copper cable. So long story short, although those connectors look just like the previous 2, 4 or 8 Gbps Fiber Optic transceivers – they have very different guts. Continue reading…
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