Posted June 4th, 2010 by Kevin Murray
By Kevin Murray, Senior Marketing Manager, Emulex
One of the greatest facets of our partnership with IBM is that both Emulex and IBM love to develop new technologies that change paradigms in IT. We love to bust myths. This has never been more evident than today. Think of x86 server I/O and a common perception comes to mind. Most people believe that x86 servers, despite becoming ever more powerful, are still a commodity that will never fully tax the I/O capabilities of the server. The easiest thing to do, most people believe, is to add another 1GbE adapter to the system when needed and maintain the status quo. This is exactly the type of myth that a partnership between Emulex and IBM challenged with the launch this year of IBM’s new eX5 servers with Virtual Fabric.
We busted this myth last week in San Francisco at a fantastic eX5 launch event with special guests Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, stars of Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters. Jamie and Adam have proven their ability to solve hundreds of urban legends and other commonly held beliefs, but in this case we were lucky to have them just for entertainment purposes; and they did not disappoint. But the real myth busting that day was being done by Emulex and IBM. Continue reading…
Posted in FCoE | No Comments
Posted October 28th, 2009 by Tom Boucher
I have been extremely busy of late making sure the last few weeks of integration testing are complete and any bugs we can find are stamped out, and I’ve been unable to keep up at least a weekly cadence this month, so I thought I would blast out some commentary on a number of things that have happened here in one big consolidated post.
It appears that the appropriate sacrifices were made to the gods of computer shows and our demonstration of the eVFA adapter on the IBM BladeCenter at Storage Networking World: Europe.
Unfortunately, due to my need to be in the States to help finish up our final testing before general availability, I was unable to attend in person. Instead, I helped walk the team over the phone through enabling the adapter & getting VMware up and running.
I’ve been following vicariously through people that have gotten updates and posted their thoughts. One author, Nigel Poulton, was lucky enough to gain some nice pictures of the HS22 with the eVFA card installed in his write-up, and he touches on something I wanted to expand on a little bit in this quote:
NOTE: Of particular interest to me was the fact that the core features, as well as the base cost, of this adapter are 10Gbps Ethernet. This is very interesting when you consider Emulex are traditionally a Fibre Channel company. Clearly Emulex are moving with the market here and recognising Ethernet as the dominant technology and building on that. Emulex also have people on IEEE 802.1 committees such as DCB. Now that’s what I call not betting against Ethernet.
Continue reading…
Tags: 10GbE, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, VFA
Posted in 10G Ethernet, FCoE, vNIC | No Comments
Posted September 4th, 2009 by Tom Boucher
If you spent any time on the Solutions Exchange floor this week at VMworld 2009 there was one thing that was pretty clear. The Cloud has come.
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. Continue reading…
Posted in FC, FCoE, Hardware Management | No Comments
Posted August 24th, 2009 by Tom Boucher
Recovering a little from some excitement of last week I wanted to complete a blog post I’d started. I continue to try and see what the rest of the world has to say about convergence and the market excitement around it.
Since my first post introducing my thoughts on where we stood with FCoE and it’s now been three months and there has been some ratification activity and there has been a few more independent bloggers out there that have begun to tear into the world of FCoE.
Continue reading…
Posted in 10G Ethernet, FCoE | No 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.
Continue reading…
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 12th, 2009 by Tom Boucher
Over the last few years the mantra from the computer industry seems to have been virtualize, virtualize, and virtualize. You can’t go to any conference without hearing about how the new widget helps you virtualize better. Whether it be a new server, a new switch, a new card, a new processor, or a new chip of some kind. Each of them will help you virtualize better.
So over the last two to three years most IT shops have enacted virtualization of one form or another. This year, you can expect the new buzzword of FCoE to be tossed around and it’s the new consolidation point. That’s where I came up with the name for this blog of ‘Down to the Wire’. Because now, consolidation is down to the wire that provides the critical data for your virtualized servers.
Continue reading…
Posted in FCoE | 3 Comments