As Emulex grows its IBM business quarter on quarter, we are investing in new staff and resources to keep up with demand. My name is Alex Hollingworth and I recently joined Emulex in EMEA, having worked at IBM for the last six years, most recently specialising in IBM Systems Networking. There have been some huge changes in those six years, but some market fundamentals have stayed the same. For example, in a market where IT vendors are using the same CPU chipsets, memory et al., to try and leverage economies of scale to remain financially competitive, it’s really all down to innovation to provide competitive differentiation. I will be writing here on topics relative to our work with IBM, innovations we are working on, events we will collaborate on, and I hope you will join me here as part of the conversation.
One such innovation is IBM’s Virtual Fabric Architecture (VFA), of which Emulex provides Virtual Fabric Adapters. IBM’s VFA optimises your network by providing more virtual network interfaces using ‘lossless’ 10Gb Ethernet. Sure, we can design our networks in the same way as we’ve always done utilising 1Gb Ethernet and scaling up the host bus adapter (HBA), Network Interface Card (NIC) and the Ethernet connections in order to conform to virtualisation best practices. However, if we do what we have always done, we will get what we have always gotten… and that just isn’t sustainable.
Furthermore, that’s hardly the innovative approach that will make our technology stand out from the crowd. With IBM’s Virtual Fabric Architecture, you can optimise and virtualise the network by splitting two ‘lossless’ 10Gb Ethernet ports in to eight virtual NICs or vNICs and even utilise two of the vNICs to carry iSCSI or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) traffic. Drastically reducing the time to deploy new solutions, not to mention NIC, HBA, cables, transceivers and uplinks required for enterprise class solutions. This means together we can design smart, innovative solutions that reduce CAPEX and OPEX expenditure and optimise our network performance. Differentiate, compete and win with Emulex and IBM’s Virtual Fabric Architecture. To learn more please go to our great microsite or join us on LinkedIn to hear about all our latest news, events and technical updates.
I look forward to the conversations here and on LinkedIn, and hope you’ll engage in the discussion with us.
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