There has been a lot of industry chatter recently about this newfangled FCoE stuff and I’ve tossed a few articles out there myself commenting on the state of the industry and all that.
However at the end of the day, in this grand scheme of things FC is still the primary solution people are working on. Sure there is some early work being done on FCoE but we still have a lot of legacy infrastructure out there to work on.
in the 2nd quarter of 2009 we spent some time together as Chris and I traveled a bit around the US and Canada to provide you with the latest and greatest details that we could in an hour and a half but I wanted to highlight a few of those again. With all the excitement around FCoE it still stands that you don’t have large amount of customers migrating or planning to migrate in 2009. There is a lot of evaluation going on, but most of the evaluations are finding that not all the key pieces to the puzzle are there yet.
We even see this reported from IBM in general with regards to 8Gb Fibre Channel. The migration to it has not been near as strong as previous revisions. Primarily because of a lack of disk arrays that support it. IBM just recently brought out the TotalStorage DS5000 series of array controllers. They now support up to 448 hard disks with the 5300 product. However the TotalStorage DS4800 is alive and well and you might be wondering why to bother with the newer 8Gb adapter when the customer doesn’t buy a DS5000 array controller.
That’s not all that the Single and Dual Port adapters or the CIOv adapter bring to the table.
There is a newer generation ASIC on these adapters that while in 4GB mode improve overall performance in key bottleneck areas. In a TPC-E benchmark on the IBM System x3850 changing out the 4Gb single port for 8Gb single port adapter and upgrading the OS to an MSI-X aware operating system increased performance by 14%.
Also if you look at the performance gains you see when combined with the Intel Xeon 5500 family you can see the 8Gb card significantly lowers CPU overhead when combined with the 5500 processor found in the latest Nehalem based servers.
Last but not least make sure you check out a comparison of the Emulex dual port’s performance compared to our competitors.
I hope to see you all at the IBM System X Technical conference in Chicago in a few weeks. Emulex is a gold sponsor this year and we will be both in our own booth and in the IBM booth demonstrating some new OneConnect based technology.
Also please double check the last newsletter you received. There’s an important survey in there it would be great if you could get it filled out before the conference.
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