Coming into 2012, I inevitably started to think of the year just gone and wondered what would be the latest and greatest from a technology perspective this coming year. Technology moves quickly and certainly we will all have some interesting challenges to solve pretty soon. The huge amount of data growth that is happening in the data centre will undoubtedly cause our customers some pain. As will data duplication, security, getting ready for the cloud and making decisions on software and infrastructure they won’t live to regret. No one wants to buy a HD DVD in a Blu-ray world!

The cloud brings a whole range of new problems to the fore. Public or private? What hardware, software, middleware, will need to be procured in order to give our customers access to a competitive advantage within their own vertical markets? Oh, and if we are to listen to the industry analysts who say, we must create and implement these new cloud strategies and make all of the investments in hardware, storage, networks and software – whilst IT spending remains flat across the board.

Maybe it won’t be a happy new year after all. But here is what I am thinking, the road to the cloud is long. We must start changing the way we design and implement our IT solutions today. For anyone who has heard me present my favourite quote: “if you do what you have always done, you will get what you always got.”\ We must start collapsing complexity and stripping cost out of our customer solutions so we will be in a position to leverage the remaining budget in order to start making our customers’ data centers cloud-ready.

In 2012, I think we will see more networking convergence than ever before. We have already started to see Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI over DCB Ethernet in IBM’s BladeCenter. And in System x servers, we will have FCoE and iSCSI converged networking capabilities very soon. I’m sure even high-end systems will have converged capabilities before too long. So don’t do what has always been done this year, look at networking as a way of collapsing complexity and streamlining costs. Convergence will undoubtedly add significant competitive advantage, allowing one flexible fabric to be used for storage and IP traffic. If we can start cutting costs, power and cables by about 35 percent it would go a long way to giving our customers a happy new year by allowing them to spend the IT budget on more interesting things than transceivers.

The difference in perception and reality… By leveraging smart network and solution design, we can make flexible, powerful and resilient cloud solutions a reality.

Happy new year,

Alex Hollingworth
Product Marketing Manager, EMEA
Emulex

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What a great week last week…the IBM STGU events are always one of the highlights of the Emulex calendar and Lisbon did not disappoint.

As the sole GOLD sponsor of the IBM System Storage Technical University in Lisbon, we were run off our feet having some great technical and commercial conversations with IBMers, business partners, distributors and customers alike. We also had some great technical sessions with our senior IBM system engineer, Tom Boucher which were very well attended with some great feedback on how people were implementing IBM Virtual Fabric Architecture and how useful the sessions were.

It was awesome to see people discussing convergence, learning new things about IBM Virtual Fabric Architecture, how it works and where it can collapse complexity and enable customers to save considerable CAPEX and OPEX expenditure. In fact, I have these conversations with you all every day. That got me thinking.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had the opportunity to meet every day to discuss any questions you might have? It would be great for anyone that needed to ask technical questions to have access to our worldwide IBM technical specialists. And it would be really good to be able to ask other IBMers and IBM Partners about their experiences and implementations of IBM Virtual Fabric Architecture, Emulex 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) adapters and not forgetting Emulex Fibre Channel products too. That is why we created ‘Emulex Connects IBM’ a LinkedIn group with hundreds of technical professionals that all share and discuss information every day.
Please join our group by clicking the button here:

Thank you all for making the IBM STGU Event in Lisbon so successful and the IBM team all look forward to seeing you in the field again soon.

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So, we all heard that Broadcom just announced the dual port Virtual Fabric Adapter for IBM BladeCenter (for switch agnostic virtual NIC [vNIC]) and to be honest, it got me thinking. With the proliferation of converged networking into our customers’ data centers, there is a need for vendors like IBM to offer a choice of adapters to ensure fairness within an overall portfolio of products. But here is the thing…why would you buy a HD DVD in a Blu-ray world?

Emulex announced on July 19th the Virtual Fabric Adapter II (VFA II), which is capable of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI, a comprehensive new universal converged network adapter (UCNA) that offers great performance, awesome value for the money and high reliability. Emulex VFA II also has the broadest level of storage support of any converged network adapter within the IBM portfolio of products. Not to mention this is the third generation of Emulex VFA technology that we have designed for IBM BladeCenter, IBM System x and X5 products. Therefore, we have thousands of customers worldwide that are enjoying the benefits of the best-selling IBM 10GbE adapter right now with many more who will be looking to implement vNIC technology with FCoE or iSCSI over the coming months.

Broadcom Virtual Fabric Adapter can only be used in ‘Switch Agnostic Mode’ meaning that Emulex is the only provider of I/O that can work with IBM Systems Networking / BNT switches that further enhance IBM’s Virtual Fabric Architecture by offering dynamic bandwidth allocation and guaranteeing network traffic delivery transmitting and receiving data. Broadcom can only guarantee traffic leaving the VFA and cannot control the receive rate of network traffic coming back into the host. If customers would like to use switch agnostic mode with other network providers, then Emulex can offer switch agnostic vNIC for customers that require it. By using IBM Systems Networking / BNT switches, we offer significant advantages that should be considered best practice when researching smart solution design. Also worth noting is that Broadcom has no unified management solution. How is it possible to create smarter systems when the Broadcom Virtual Fabric Adapter will force our customers to integrate more levels of I/O management software in order to have SAN-wide management capabilities? Not really collapsing complexity here, just adding more layers of I/O management software!

Furthermore Emulex VFA II offers enhanced functionality for virtual environments by offering hardware offload for all storage protocols like IP, FCoE and iSCSI. “What does this mean?” I hear you cry… well, it means that unlike other vendors, we will not steal CPU cycles to compute network traffic. As a result, Emulex can typically host more virtual machines (VMs) on our physical hardware than any other I/O vendor.

Choice for me is a good thing. Competition brings out the best in all of us. Emulex VFA II is not on its own in the IBM converged networking space and after three long years, Broadcom now has an offering. But have they created a underwater hairdryer? A HD DVD in a Blu-ray world? You be the judge.

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For those of you who were lucky enough to be in Orlando for the IBM System Storage Technical University, I am sure you will all agree that it was a great event. Pretty warm too! Great content was delivered by IBM in their keynote by Brian Truskowski, General Manger Systems Storage and Networking, discussing the ways in which storage is exploding. He noted that we need smarter solution design and better solutions in order to satisfy our customers insatiable need for more storage, whilst being sensitive to the fact that financial budgets remain pretty much flat year-on-year.

Then Emulex’s very own VP of marketing Shaun Walsh delivered another awesome keynote explaining the state of play in I/O. He discussed how Emulex is superbly positioned to help customers get access to their data using converged networking to increase network utilization and reduce the amount of hardware you need to run IP and storage networks. In an age where data is exploding and virtualisation is proliferating into everything we do in the data center, Emulex offers solutions that collapse complexity and deliver best-of-breed technology ensuring we design smart solutions that represent great value for the money.

Orlando was also pretty special for Emulex as we announced our Virtual Fabric Adapter II (VFA) on the 19th July, which I also discussed in this blog post. The Emulex VFA II for IBM BladeCenter is a dual channel 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) card that supports Data Center Bridging (DCB) with multiple I/O functions built in. With VFA II, you can configure up to 8 virtual NICs (vNICs) per physical card, with the option to run iSCSI or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) on two of the virtual ports.

Additionally, we hosted three training events that were very well attended by end users and IBMers alike.

As for the fun stuff, we successfully gave away three awesome quadricopter parrot drones to some lucky winners! A huge thank you to all those people that attended the sessions and we at Emulex look forward to seeing you all in the field sometime soon.

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This week, Emulex has announced the next generation of server I/O for IBM BladeCenter which includes better performance and 20% better energy efficiency thanks a more integrated ASIC design. Furthermore Emulex is adding huge functionality optimizations to the IBM BladeCenter portfolio with VFA II that will revolutionize the way we design our systems and solutions.

Virtual Fabric Adapter II (VFA II) for IBM BladeCenter is a dual channel 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) card that supports Data Center Bridging (DCB) and Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) with multiple I/O functions built in as standard. With VFA II, you can configure up to 8 virtual NICs (vNIC) per physical card with the option to run iSCSI or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) on two of the virtual ports. Unlike software-based iSCSI and FCoE technologies, Emulex hardware iSCSI and FCoE offload engines mean we let the CPU do what it was designed to do… crunch data! Consequently, it’s possible to run more VMs per physical server by making the right I/O adapter choice. The Emulex VFA II is supported with HS22, HS22V and HX5 Blades.

Emulex VFA II lets you utilize best of breed performance, energy efficiencies and functionality today and should you decide to run iSCSI or FCoE, you can purchase the appropriate license key at another time. Emulex and IBM want to give our customers the opportunity to ‘pay as you grow’, optimizing your budgets today and in the future.

We offer end-to-end virtualization with BNT Virtual Fabric Switch Modules so IT managers can combine IBM HS22 Blades, Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapters and the BNT Virtual Fabric 10Gb Switch Module for IBM BladeCenter to enable an end-to-end virtualization solution. The BNT Virtual Fabric Switch Module recognizes the Virtual Fabric Adapter and allows bandwidth to be assigned in increments of 100MB with vNIC management done from the BNT Virtual Fabric Switch Module. Bandwidth allocations affect both inbound and outbound I/O and take effect immediately. The BNT Virtual Fabric Switch Module also supports DCB standards that enable network convergence with FCoE. The Emulex VFA II also supports switch agnostic vNIC capabilities ensuring that whatever networking products IT managers have chosen for their IBM BladeCenter, Emulex VFA II can offer them vNIC functionality and I/O bandwidth allocation outbound from the server in order to create world class I/O solutions.

We’re proud to bring to market the next generation of open, integrated and complete network convergence solution, in the VFA II. If you would like to read more, please visit our microsite, found here. We’ll also be demonstrating this technology next week at the IBM System Storage Technical University in Orlando, Florida July 18 -22. If you’re going, stop by our booth #90 to take a peek.

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Next week, we’re heading to sunny Orlando, Florida for the IBM System Storage Technical University event, which will be a great opportunity for us to showcase Emulex solutions that power many IBM STG products today, including IBM’s innovative Virtual Fabric Architecture for IBM System x and IBM BladeCenter that I mentioned last week in my previous post. It’ll also be a chance for us to talk to many IBMers and end users from all over the world and we look forward to seeing you at the show.
If you are going to Orlando, check out our shortlist of 3 things not to miss at the show:

1. We’re speaking: We have several talks planned that we hope you will come and see. I will be speaking on ‘Breaking the I/O Bottleneck’ on Thursday, July 21 at 8:20 am. We will also have a presentation by Shaun Walsh, VP of marketing (@cingulus on Twitter), on trends and directions with IBM and Emulex that will discuss some of our collaborations together on Monday, July 18 at 10:30 am, and one from Tom Boucher, systems engineer (@one_wire on Twitter) on ‘Creating Competitive Advantage by Revolutionizing I/O’ on Tuesday, July 19 and Wednesday, July 20 at 1:00 pm.
2. We’re demonstrating our Virtual Fabric Adapters: Come by and see our technology in action. (And check out my blog next week for more on this technology.) This is a great opportunity to see the latest and greatest, best-of-breed technology in action… You won’t be disappointed.
3. We’re giving away Quadricopters and iPads! There are several ways you can snag one of these giveaways at the show. You can stop by our booth (#90) or any of our sessions to be entered to win a Parrot AR.Drone Quadricopter powered by an iPhone/iPod touch/iPad, or the IBM booth that we are co-exhibiting in, for a chance to win an iPad (one drawing per day).

I am delighted to be attending this event and will be looking forward to meeting up with colleagues, IBMers and end users alike. If you’d like to follow my tweets from the show, I’m at @alhollingworth (and check out @emulex for ongoing tweets and pictures too). We’ll look forward to seeing you at the show!

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