I recently learned a great lesson: even when you think you are doing everything right, it is still very easy to fail.
We recently helped IBM with a long-time customer who was in process of transitioning to the latest generation of IBM System x servers. The customer had just received a new IBM System x3850 X5 and was surprised to find that it included a blue I/O adapter. They hadn’t ordered any I/O options, so they were a bit confused as to how the card ended up in their server, and why it was blue. Don’t get me wrong: in the grand scheme of things, this was a good problem to have. I would much rather have a customer receive our product and ask what it is than never know about it and not buy the right server as a result. The thing that keeps me up at night is the customers who could be getting a lot of benefit from our products but don’t know about the great technology we have available. (It is 5 a.m. as I type this. I am not an early riser.)
The blue adapter in question was the Emulex 10GbE Integrated Virtual Fabric Adapter (VFA). The Integrated VFA is included with most models of the IBM System x3850 X5 and is available for integration into several other System x and BladeCenter servers as well. The Emulex Integrated VFA is a custom PCIe card with a dedicated slot and delivers all of the benefits of Emulex 10GbE technology to IBM’s new servers. We are very excited about it and we’ve been putting a lot of effort into making customers aware that it is included and the great features that it has. As I illustrated above, I’ve recently discovered we need to put more effort into customer awareness.
Clearly, this design is unique. Server vendors generally integrate their standard I/O technology directly on the motherboard rather than in a custom integrated card. IBM chose to do things a little differently for a simple reason. IBM knows that 10GbE is soon to become the de facto standard in I/O networking, but they also know it is still ramping and that most customers today still use 1GbE. The integrated card gives IBM a lot of design flexibility with this generation of servers. They can choose where to incorporate 10GbE and they can choose when, without resorting to redesigning the motherboard. If you look at IBM’s server platforms today, you will see that the more powerful the server, the more likely it will have integrated 10GbE. At some point in the future, as 10GbE adoption takes off, IBM will have an easy way to transition more and more of their existing models to include low-cost 10GbE integrated into the system.
This is a smart move on IBM’s part, but it does beg the question of why the interest in 10gbE and what makes IBM and others in the industry believe that widespread adoption of it is imminent. To answer that question, Steven Hill and Tim Dales took an in-depth look at the 10GbE market and the new IBM systems in their industry brief, “Paving the New Data Center Autobahn.” They do a great job of analyzing the industry transition to 10GbE, and how IBM and Emulex fit into it. I hope that, among other things, this paper will serve as a great way to build awareness on our solution.
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