Posted July 15th, 2011 by Alex Hollingworth
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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Posted July 7th, 2011 by Alex Hollingworth
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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Posted May 16th, 2011 by Kevin Murray
Emulex Connects™ is our new branding and nothing could be more relevant for what we do as a company. Our entire product set is about connecting servers, storage and people. But for us, it is more than that. It is also about connecting to people. We know that our relationships with our partners at IBM and in the channel are major reason for our success. We constantly try to share dialog with our partner, and perhaps more importantly, encourage our partners to share more with each other in an effort to make them more successful. We regularly hear about customer success stories with our joint solutions with IBM and we know that if we can do a better job of sharing this information, we can find more customers just like them who can achieve the same benefits.
With that in mind, we recently launched Emulex Connect IBM on LinkedIn. We plan to keep it regularly updated with relevant information to help uncover new opportunities and new ways to help customers. Partners can share information and ask questions as well. This entire effort is geared toward Connecting IBM and Emulex in the field making it easier to understand, recommend, and sell our joint solutions. I look forward to seeing everyone there.
Tags: IBM, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Groups
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Posted May 3rd, 2011 by Kevin Murray
I am thrilled to report that the answer to this question for Emulex is more than 700!
I spent the week in Orlando working at the IBM Systems Technical Enablement University and the event was a huge success for Emulex, and I believe for IBM as well! This was the best executed and best attended IBM event in a number of years and lucky for us, because it was at this event we decided to increase the Emulex presence. The combination of our increased effort at IBM’s successful show meant that our team was losing our voices from talking with so many people.
The week started off with an executive presentation from our Vice President John Alfieri, who talked about a major joint win that Emulex and IBM had together. Many in the audience stopped by our booth later to tell us that they were starting to understand the power of our joint solution and were looking forward to working with us on new opportunities. We also had two great technical breakout sessions delivered by Tom Boucher on how Emulex is helping to revolutionize IBM I/O.
The event covered all of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group(STG), so it was the perfect venue for us to put forth our best effort. Some people may not be aware that Emulex has technology in most STG products today. We were one of only a few exhibitors that had products that everyone in the audience was using, so every contact was a great contact. Our booth was a non-stop buzz of activity throughout the show and many deals were discussed with our sales team. An event management representative told me on the last day that our booth was easily the busiest of the event and was the busiest he had seen in at least the last 10 shows he had done.
Thanks to our great Emulex team and IBM’s event execution, I believe we have cracked the code of what it takes to have a truly successful event. I am looking forward to the next one!
Tags: IBM, IBM Bladecenter, IBM Power Systems, IBM Technical Enablement Summit, System x, VFA, Virtual Fabric
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Posted February 28th, 2011 by Kevin Murray
Emulex had the great opportunity to participate in the first IBM Blade.University event at the IBM Palisades Executive Conference Center in Palisades, NY recently. Despite being about as middle-of-nowhere as one can get in the New York area, the event filled the room and we had a great dialogue with customers about Converged Infrastructure and the explosive growth of 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE).
The afternoon portion of the event was dedicated to the importance of networking to the future of the data center. Mike Easterly of Blade Network Technologies (BNT) spoke about how networking is now a key differentiator in IT deployments and that was a big part of the reason that IBM acquired BNT late last year.
Emulex had the privilege of closing out the presentation portion of the event. Shaun Walsh spoke about connecting the data center of the future and the impending ubiquity of 10GbE. This is obviously a key market for Emulex so we’ve been studying the growth of 10GbE closely. Shaun did a fantastic job of laying out the key drivers of 10G growth and explaining that the benefits of 10G are here today with IBM Virtual Fabric.
We are proud to be IBM’s preferred supplier for 10GbE I/O and we are thrilled to be participating in Blade.University. Blade.org has several more dates lined up with more on the way, so keep an eye out for when the event comes to your city.
Tags: Blade.org, Blade.university, BladeCenter, Converged Infrastructure Seminar, IBM, IBM Converged Infrastructure, System x, Virtual Fabric
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Posted February 10th, 2011 by Kevin Murray
We’ve been shipping Virtual Fabric Adapters for IBM for well over a year now, and we have a lot of customers happily using Virtual Fabric to connect their virtual machines (VMs) on IBM System x and BladeCenter. So, while it was exciting to finally get VMware on board with the new technology by publishing support for the virtual Network Interface Card (vNIC) functions of Virtual Fabric, we also know that it’s been working for some time now. So you will have to forgive us for not spending $3 million on a Super Bowl ad to promote the new support.
Don’t get me wrong. VMware support is critical for a solution like Virtual Fabric to assure potential customers that the technology works in their environment. We’ve been working with VMware for a long time to make this happen. The only reason we’re not more excited is that we’ve known that the solution works for a long time now, and we have many customers who have already deployed it, customers like Sheraton Hotel and Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Services.
So why did it take so long for VMware to show support? Like all groundbreaking new technologies, Virtual Fabric is a paradigm shift in how things are done. The ability to carve up 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) connections into multiple, separate paths is a new way of processing network traffic. It has tremendous advantages for data centers to manage their I/O, particularly in virtual environments that require multiple I/O paths to deliver performance for each VM. But it’s never been done before, so it didn’t fit into VMware standard test procedures. In order for VMware to certify the technology, they needed to come up with a new test plan.
In any case, we are looking forward to working with many more new customers who maybe needed to have a little of the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes with a formal support position. There is nothing standing in their way now. We’re happy to bring those customers into the Virtual Fabric family, but we’re not going to go too crazy on the promotion.
Tags: BladeCenter, IBM, System x, Virtual Fabric, VMware, vNIC
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Posted December 9th, 2010 by Kevin Murray
8Gb/s Fibre Channel has been on the market for a couple of years now, but has only just recently tipped the scales to become the majority of HBA shipments over 4Gb/s. There seems to be a lot of customers out there that seem to believe that 4Gb/s is doing enough for them and they don’t need to upgrade to 8Gb/s. This is a myth for a number of reasons. There are too many reasons to fit into a single blog entry, in fact, so we’re going to discuss each of the reasons with individual posts. Check back each week for the next reason. Better yet, respond with some ideas of your own.
Reason number one is performance (surprised?). This may seem like an obvious one, and it usually gets discounted immediately by customers that have 4Gb/s infrastructures under the assumption that an 8Gb/s adapter is still going to operate at 4Gb/s when connected to 4Gb/s storage arrays. This assumption is wrong.
8Gb/s HBAs deliver improved performance in 4Gb/s environments. Emulex Labs demonstrated this by comparing performance of an Emulex 8Gb/s HBA versus an Emulex 4Gb/s HBA connected to 4Gb/s Storage. With these benchmarks, 8Gb/s HBAs in 4Gb/s environments showed:
- Nearly double data warehousing throughput (Figure 1)
- 15 percent greater IOPS (Figure 2)
- 16 percent improvement in I/O latency (Figure 3)
Even in 4Gb/s environments, 8Gb/s HBAs will deliver better performance. Some customers might say that they performance of their 4Gb/s HBAs is enough, but why would anyone make a decision to go for lower performance when there is minimal cost for 8Gb/s and everyone is being asked to do more with less?
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Posted November 15th, 2010 by Kevin Murray
The biggest problem we have selling 10GbE adapters today is that almost everyone has 1GbE network infrastructures. 10GbE has a lot going for it, with vastly better performance the promise of convergence, but without a network of 10GbE Top of Rack switches in every datacenter it’s a difficult sell for a lot of customer today. The ever increasing need for bandwidth in datacenters means it really is just a matter of time before the industry standardizes on 10GbE, but unless customers are building out new datacenters and essentially starting from scratch, ripping out their entire 1GbE network infrastructure and replacing it with 10GbE is an expensive proposition.
What if customers had an opportunity to introduce 10GbE into their network without having to rip out their 1GbE infrastructure, but still take advantage of the improved performance of 10GbE and in fact lower costs? That sounds like something that could generate some excitement as well as pave the way for customers to be prepared for a smooth transition to 10GbE over time. This is exactly the opportunity that IBM Virtual Fabric provides and many customers have already deployed.
Take Sheraton Hotel in Old San Juan as an example. Sheraton had a requirement to upgrade their infrastructure to support new casino applications but they had limited space and limited budget. Sheraton had not specific desire to upgrade to 10Gbe, but when they saw the advantages they would get from implementing IBM Virtual Fabric they realized they would be getting even better performance than they planned for at a lower cost along with plenty of room to grow. With IBM Virtual Fabric, all of Sheraton’s blade servers communicate through high performance 10GbE pipes using Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapters and BNT Virtual Fabric Switch Modules inside the IBM BladeCenter Chassis. The BNT switch is able to connect to uplink 1GbE switches so Sheraton did not have to touch their existing network outside the chassis. Users are enjoying increased performance and Sheraton’s servers are ready for whenever they decide to upgrade the network to 10GbE.
Sheraton is a great example of a simple way to introduce 10GbE into customer environments while increasing performance and lower cost and complexity. We think it is such a good example we wrote up a case study on it. Please take a look here.
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Posted August 31st, 2010 by Kevin Murray
I recently learned a great lesson: even when you think you are doing everything right, it is still very easy to fail.
We recently helped IBM with a long-time customer who was in process of transitioning to the latest generation of IBM System x servers. The customer had just received a new IBM System x3850 X5 and was surprised to find that it included a blue I/O adapter. They hadn’t ordered any I/O options, so they were a bit confused as to how the card ended up in their server, and why it was blue. Don’t get me wrong: in the grand scheme of things, this was a good problem to have. I would much rather have a customer receive our product and ask what it is than never know about it and not buy the right server as a result. The thing that keeps me up at night is the customers who could be getting a lot of benefit from our products but don’t know about the great technology we have available. (It is 5 a.m. as I type this. I am not an early riser.)
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Posted July 27th, 2010 by Kevin Murray
In my last entry, I talked about how we’ve been busting the myth of 10G infrastructures with the use of virtual network interface (vNIC) technology in IBM Virtual Fabric. Now I would like to talk about the second unique feature of Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapters (VFAs) that is turning 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) infrastructures into essential tools of high-performance data centers. The second unique feature is the ability to upgrade the VFA to support a combination of vNIC with storage protocols. In other words, the Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter can support all I/O needs that the server has.
It is this concept that turns 10GbE infrastructures from nice to have to essential for today’s data centers. This is a single adapter that can support all networking and storage traffic and do it in a way that is flexible to the needs of the administrators of each system. The ability to converge onto a single I/O infrastructure provides the capability to reduce costs, reduce complexity and improve performance. Is there anyone out there who does not want to get better performance in a simpler configuration at lower cost?
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