Posted November 10th, 2009 by Tom Boucher
One of the key elements of Emulex’s approach to this whole convergence solution is the whole point of calling it a converged network is to actually bring the same functions you had before to the table. It’s not much of a convergence if you use an ethernet cable to run your fibre channel protocol over it and do nothing else. You need to supply the same features you’ve enjoyed from your previous generation of NIC functionality and FC functionality, you’re just using a new physical layer.
At least, that’s what I thought. Then I started having people react to our solution and tell me how ‘nice’ it is we actually did something as simple as NIC Teaming. So I wanted to list out the functionality we offer on our 10Gb NIC part of the solution.
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Tags: 10GbE, convergence, FCoE
Posted in 10G Ethernet, Competitive | No Comments
Posted November 2nd, 2009 by Tom Boucher
As an avid technologist I try my best to keep up with ‘the industry’. I do this by monitoring and participating (when I have time) with conversations on Twitter, following some of the best storage-related blogs on the web (Hat Tip: Scott Lowe) and in general just being a nosy person following links wherever they’ll lead me.
So back in June, QLogic asked a question about whether or not they thought encryption of data at the Fibre Channel adapter level was necessary. What interested me most about this was how they said you should buy something they don’t make in order to get the best deal. It seems counterintuitive to me for a company who makes storage networking products to say ‘this sucks, go buy it from someone else’.
Even stranger to me was that this technology they recommended wasn’t deemed ‘good enough’ by a number of customers I have met and talked about security options with storage area networks. Continue reading…
Tags: encryption, FC, Fibre Channel, Security
Posted in Competitive, FC, Security | No Comments
Posted August 8th, 2009 by Tom Boucher
One of the most interesting things about the Intel Nehalem launch that was done at IBM was the full fledge embrace of the UEFI firmware. Almost a year ahead of the rest of the competition. In both the System x and BladeCenter space if it has Nehalem in it, it has UEFI as the firmware.
This introduces challenges to your I/O card vendors as they need to support it. There are two ways to do this, the right way, or, the wrong way. The right way involves the simple term HID. Human Interface Device. It’s a fancy engineering term for ‘make it easy to use’. One of the challenges about I/O devices in general is that the way they interact typically is not with easy to use/remember numbers. Whether it’s an IP address, a World Wide Name, or a hexadecimal memory range these aren’t things you easily remember. Continue reading…
Posted in Competitive | 2 Comments
Posted June 29th, 2009 by Tom Boucher
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.
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Posted in 10G Ethernet, Competitive, FCoE | No Comments
Posted June 14th, 2009 by Tom Boucher
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?
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Posted in Competitive, FCoE | No Comments
Posted May 22nd, 2009 by Tom Boucher
…it’s easy if you try.
Recently in the events we’ve held out with the IBM technical community here in the United States & Canada we’ve come across an unusual situation.
Apparently, a fibre channel adapter competitor of ours has decided it’s time to educate the world on the evil’s of heat sinks. That’s right, those innocuous little things that have been on computer components, cars, trucks, motorcycles, and any other mechanical device that generates heat for decades have secretly been trying to destroy us. They’ll starve air from your computer, make it hard to push air through, sorts of crazy claims.
Also according to them we’ve got nothing but a bag full of idiots in our engineering & development organization because we put heat sinks everywhere. They clearly know more than we do because they can make chips that don’t need heat sinks.
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Posted in Competitive, FC | No Comments