You know, my crystal ball has been doing pretty good the last few weeks. It’s like I’m not even trying to predict some of the missteps we’re going to be seeing as this new 10Gb Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and all the other things ‘the industry’ is going to be pushing for adoption over the next few years.
In my last post I talked about this new word everyone is tossing about the new buzz word ‘convergence’ and how I noticed that it wasn’t very converge-y (is that a word?) of them to announce a new adapter, and then only talk about one of the features that would be needed to truly ‘converge’ an adapter.
Imagine my ‘oh no they didn’t’ reaction when indeed, they announced YET ANOTHER 10Gb Ethernet Card. They even go so far to toss in a quote from someone with SAN in their name in the press release and they group the ethernet card under their ‘converged networking‘ banner on their product page but the only thing converge-y about it is that it has an ethernet port and can go in a server right next to their FCoE adapter.
Oh, and until April 30th, that chip had a Netxen brand on it. So now, I’d imagine it’s not the same device driver stack as the ethernet port on their FCoE adapter.
So there you now have two cards that ‘converge’ your network. Each with a specific function and absolutely no convergence whatsoever. So if you want 10Gb Networking & FCoE you get two adapters. Just like before. Looking at the definition of the verb convergence you get: ” (of a number of things) gradually change so as to become similar or develop something in common” or “come together from different directions so as eventually to meet”. I guess our competitor will get there eventually, but the market isn’t going to wait forever. They want a solid convergence point, and soon.
On another note, I’m going to do a couple plugs because we’re giving away some things on our website.
The first is if you download Emulex’s Converginomics Guide guide you get a chance to win a free Kindle 2. For you technical guys just download it quick and skim it. It’s fairly high level but hey a chance to win a Kindle 2 is always worth downloading a PDF file.
Also on the IBM Microsite we’re giving away a free iPod Touch via a random drawing if you answer a quick survey.
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