Over the last month we’ve seen some competitive announcements from a longtime competitor and a longtime partner of Emulex in the FCoE arena with regards to IBM OEM’d solutions. Cries of victory from our longtime competitor have already begun, but what have they really won?
I’m happy to see some offerings in this space as it starts the conversation. However like I have previously mentioned just because you brought the horse to water, you’re not going to force them to drink. As others have learned, in the IT Industry being ‘first’ doesn’t always translate to ‘market winner’. So what does it take to be a winner?
First and foremost I strongly believe this is not a race, but a marathon. There is a sequence of things that needs to fall into place over the coming months to set the stage for FCoE technology to become to the forefront. The most important one of solidifying the standard and meeting the necessary T11 certifications.
I dislike using the way overused ‘these economic times’ because I think this would be true regardless of the financial situation but I continue to stand by my ‘not going to rip and replace‘ statement. There needs to be a compelling reason to change. I think both of our competitors missed the mark when it comes to this.
I’ve been enjoying the first five months now with Emulex and have spent the last two months touring the US and Canada and visiting with IBM’s strong Systems Engineer community that is responsible for the System X and BladeCenter portfolio and have gotten some great feedback from what their customers are telling them. I’ve also had some time to visit with some long time Emulex customers to get some feedback from them as well.
I always find it interesting in how some of the tech industry news ‘reports’ these days. When you see a quote about how ‘QLogic has a leg up on Emulex’.
Of course you see it touted over on twitter by Q as being some huge win for themselves. However in this instance the leg is more of a pirate wooden leg, and you really wouldn’t want to stand on it.
By this measurement, the ‘leg up’ is that you have an adapter that you call a CNA that can do FCOE hardware accelerated functionality with your own developed ASIC. What I find interesting is at least for now, everything they talk about this adapter is how great it is at FCoE, but no comments whatsoever about using it in conjunction with any other protocol. What good is a CNA that is positioned as an FCoE adapter and provides no other details?
CNA stands for Converged Network Adapter. The idea is you Converge your SAN data and what was formerly your network traffic onto one component. You don’t release a FCoE adapter and call it a CNA if you aren’t going to provide the same performance aspects across the ability of the card.
Back in May we demonstrated our new uCNA adapter technology at Interop Vegas. We showed TCP/IP, iSCSI, and FCoE capabilities across multiple operating systems & environments.
I’ve seen the performance claims of 250,000 IOPS per port and I’m surprised that it’s something to be proud of. Based on past claims one has to guess that this is the dreaded 512b block test that thrashes the ASIC on the card, but isn’t a real world test. The current generation 8GB/s FC adapters from Emulex can break 200k IOPS per port in this test and we’re expecting an order of magnitude improvement over this number when our OneConnect adapter.
I’d like to point out that while it’s easy for some random systems engineer employee of Emulex to say something about performance but if you compare past results where we have had significant leadership it can’t be all that hard to imagine us willing to introduce a product without being certain that we will continue our trend of 35%+ or higher performance numbers.
Right now however this is just a war of words and measuring of inconsequential numbers printed on paper. It’ll as always come down to when the rubber meets the road. Just because you got their first at the stop light, doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to keep up for the long haul.
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