What is a Cloud? It’s Cloud Computing that a lot of vendors have jumped onto whole heartedly, and with good reason, as this is where a lot of growth potential can come from.

But for the nerds on the ground, what makes cloud computing any different from a hardware perspective than the computing we’ve been doing for the last ten years, or longer?

In my sarcastic ‘been there done that’ view of the world, I say not a whole lot.Now certainly there is a lot of new software layers being implemented here with all sorts of fancy new features like provisioning and a host of other features, but at the end of the day, there is still a computer with a processor, memory, and I/O doing something. What becomes more important now is how hard or how easy it is to remotely manage this computer. This is where hardware makers are going to have to improve & implement new designs that allow for as much remote access as possible, because one of the key features of Cloud Computing is that the source of the cloud is not where you are.

From the perspective of hardware management there is a few areas where Emulex based technology will be used to work ‘in the clouds’ However one of the key features of cloud computing where I think Emulex’s value add will be strongest is in our remote management capabilities using HBAnyware, or it’s forthcoming converged management tool of OneCommand.

While stand alone is great, so is remote scripting capabilities to allow you to integrate into larger class management practices. This is something HBAnyware/OneCommand has excelled at for years with such tools as PowerShell in Windows or through your standard scripting capabilities in the *nix operating systems.

So while the marketing guys are dancing around talking about clouds and what not, keep in mind that the remote capabilities of the components in the servers – just like always – are important.

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.

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.

As a technical computer professional when you run across something this stupid you wonder what on earth they were thinking, and what kind of engineering they have that would allow them as a company to make such ridiculous claims. Especially when the company they level the claims at happens to have quality engineering people and a thermal imaging camera laying around. As the saying goes, a picture is worth 1000 words.

The ridiculous claims start with how hot we are, and we have to use a heat sink and they don’t. So what happens when you pull our heat sink off, turn on a computer and put some cards in it? I’ll let you know, because we’re doing that right now. A little sneak peak is on the same workload, it’s pretty toasty on both cards however even without a heat sink our card is cooler.

Once the data is all finished, I’ll provide the workload, the server, and the ambient input temperature for the entire test.