At Emulex, we have built a management team that works as a team. As CEO, it is expected that I would say we work as a team, but it really is how we work. Jeff Benck, our President and COO, is sharply focused on delivering our results and implementing our plans over the next 24 months while I am focused beyond that, on 25-48 months. The choice to speak about months vs. years was done specifically, we use the term months vs. years when discussing our focus areas, to lend a sense of urgency. In the technology business we are all familiar with Gartner’s Hype Cycle Model that outlines how technologies go through 5 stages of development:

(Source: Gartner)

1. Technology Trigger – When the technologies discussions and standards are “on the rise”
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations – When the positioning frenzy and the VC investment at its “peak”
3. Trough of Disillusionment – When we discover that a technology didn’t do everything we hoped or we found other ways of solving the need
4. Slope of Enlightenment – When we are developing real markets and solving real problems
5. Plateau of Productivity – When the market finally matures and the cycle begins again

This cycle can seem to happen overnight, in a few years or take over a decade, as we have seen with 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE). That is why we have to think about our new market segments and opportunities in months vs. years. The winds of change and the opinions that drive that jet stream of investment, engineering and positioning have to be nimble and ready to correct our course quickly, or Emulex will be left behind in critical new segments. At our recent sales meeting and investor’s analyst day, we provided our insight on some of the top disruptive technologies and where these are in relation to the various stages of the hype cycle. (See the sample chart above)

This is the first in a series of blogs about five key technologies that Emulex will be working on as we deliver on new design wins in the next 24 months and research how these will change the data center 25-48 months from now. These five disruptive technologies are:

In this blog, we will focus on Cloud Computing and how this utility model will be applied to data services. Just as the scalability and flexibility of utilities has driven growth in the use and accessibility of water, power and telephones…cloud computing will do the same for IT services. At the recent Interop show in New York, Dave Crespi, our CTO, gave a great talk on this. The key thing to remember about the cloud is that there are six major trends worth paying attention to.

1. Cloud Providers Deploy Services not Servers – They think about delivering services that scale to millions of users and require new models of I/O (Universal Converged Network Adapters [UCNAs] and Host Bus Adapters [HBAs]) and management (Pilot iBMC). We are looking at technologies that provide I/O and management as completely remote services that fit their model of container based servers and I/O for global scale. This includes, for example, driving bandwidth beyond 10GbE. Emulex will deliver more than incremental bandwidth using 40GbE and 100GbE technology as well as advanced services required to support I/O and storage in the cloud, including provisioning and security.
2. “Internet Scale” I/O and Management Services – We will use services-optimized firmware and software-based solutions to deliver services-driven I/O and management services to provide “Content Delivery Networks” that optimize I/O to meeting fast growing segments of the cloud, such as video delivery. We will use OneCommand Guardian to deliver security that creates compliance driven clouds. We will use OneCommand Vision to balance I/O across the cloud for NAS, iSCSI, FCoE and FC. We will use Pilot, our baseboard management controllers, to seamlessly scale and integrate the management of remote services and infrastructure.
3. The Cloud Solutions Stack is All Virtual – As we look at deploying cloud-based or cloud-enabled data centers, the entire solution stack needs to be virtualized. A great example of this is SR-IOV (Single Root-I/O Virtualization)! This is a technology that allows Emulex to provide up to 128 Virtual I/O devices from a single LOM or controller, but has the intelligence to improve performance while preserving the flexibility of a fully virtualized cloud enabled data center stack.
4. 1 Billion to 3 Billion Internet Users in Less than 5 Years – Depending on when you want to start counting from, it took the Internet 20-40 years to go from 1 to 1 Billion users. According to IDC, the number of users will reach 3 Billion by 2014. This will drive growth in the use of cloud computing services, where many applications are now being delivered.
5. The Storage Universe is Growing to 7 ZettaBytes (7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) – According to IDC1, the storage universe will grow from 1 to 7 ZettaBytes by 2015. Video and pictures will drive 90% of that new storage. The number one delivery platform for this data will be over the web and cloud computing services.
6. “Internet Scale” Transactions need 16Gb Fibre Channel – With the growth of NAS, you would expect that SANs would be shrinking, but that is not the case. SANs have been and continue to be the driver of transactions for database, OLTP and other compute intensive services such as credit cards. SANs are still growing at 56.6% CAGR through 2014. Why? Almost everyone of those 2MB NAS files drive at least 10, 4-8K data base records (Phone call log, phone payment, web vendor, credit card company, issuing bank, web cookies etc). This means SANs too have to scale to meet growth of the internet transactions.

The bottom line is that the cloud, and the mobility it supports, has just begun to scale, expand its reach and change the way we communicate, transact business and share information across the globe. Many of the technologies that will drive and support this explosion have been working through the hype cycle to become truly disruptive and change how IT and business work. Emulex is working with our partners, OEMs, customers to meet these needs. 2011 will be year of significant growth and change in our business and we are looking forward to meeting and exceeding those challenges.

–

IDC: IDC Predictions 2011: Welcome to the new Mainstream (December 2010)

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments