We all have our favorite data points when we think about the cloud. Whether it is the growth in IT spending ($1.8 trillion in 2012, according to IDC¹), the number of smartphones and tablets (700 million smartphones and tablets will be shipped in 2012, according to IDC¹), or the growth of the total data in the storage universe (to more than 8 zettabytes by 2015, according to IDC¹), the list goes on. However, there is one constant in this amazing digital universe. All of the phones, servers, tablets, laptops and devices have to be connected, and increasingly, 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) is the way they are being connected in the web infrastructure. This is why we say Emulex ‘Connects the Cloud.’ As we announced recently, reports from both the Dell’Oro Group and Crehan Research show that Emulex is shipping almost 35 percent of all 10GbE ports today and we have grown that number consecutively over the past five quarters.

The Drivers of Bigger 10GbE pipes… 4G, IPTV and Software-as-a-Service

ESG published a new report in May² saying that 33 percent of existing corporations are using some form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and that number is expected to reach 70 percent by 2014. If you combine this with 90 percent of new data being generated by photos and video (according to IDC¹), 4G networks driving content to and from smartphones and tablets, then the need for greater bandwidth is self-evident. The cloud is connected with IP and Ethernet, and while 3G/4G and wireless are the key connectivity options for edge devices (smartphones, tablets, PCs), 10GbE is becoming the way to support the resulting growing data and bandwidth demands.

Expanding Connectivity with the Cloud

Emulex’s core products have been focused on Fibre Channel for most of the past decade. Fibre Channel is still a solid market because it is the primary transaction-based network for recording financial information and credit card transactions. As more of our transactions become digital, we will see Fibre Channel maintain a solid place in the data center as the “Swiss banking of networking.” So, let’s look at a typical transaction to download a movie and how Emulex is expanding its connectivity footprint in the data center. In the diagram below, we have two primary networking domains in the cloud — Ethernet that is used to communicate and deliver content, and Fibre Channel that supports database and financial functions to do the business side of the transactions in the data center.
The good news is that as the number of digital transactions grows, the amount of Fibre Channel block storage also grows. The transactional data tends to be fixed in 4/8K blocks for each transaction, but the files being moved to deliver a movie are much bigger, sometimes 1-10GB, depending on length of the movie and the quality (Standard, HD, BlueRay, 3D). This means that for each new transaction, Emulex is connecting the ‘Swiss banking side’ with Fibre Channel, and we are now delivering the content with 10GbE. Obviously, the size and volume of the content files are bigger and need more bandwidth, hence the stronger growth opportunity in 10GbE during the next five years. Let’s look at the diagram below and see how Emulex is “connecting the cloud.”

• Step 1 – A customer is sitting at his laptop and wants to rent or buy a new movie. They use wireless or 3G/4G to log on to the website to select the movie they want. In this step of the transaction, Emulex 10GbE is connecting the telco network to the website. The website is using 10GbE to help the server and storage systems find the right movie data and let the customer know the movie is ready for purchase.
• Step 2 – The order is placed and Emulex helps in two ways. First, we again connect the telco network to the website and deliver the order information to the right web server application. Next, we move the credit card information to the financial application server and use Fibre Channel to record the financial transaction and store the credit card data on our Fibre Channel “Swiss bank” network.’ Finally, we help send the confirmation of the order back to the customer through our 10GbE connectivity on the web server that connects to the telco network.
• Step 3 – To deliver the movie, Emulex’s 10GbE connections deliver using a new technology called Hadoop that runs over 10GbE. This new technology is being used extensively at major web sites as a way to sort, manage and deliver large data files and sets very efficiently.

More Steps and More Bandwidth Delivered on Emulex Connectivity

As you can see in this example, we are not only growing with the number of cloud transactions, we are expanding our infrastructure touch points inside the data center. So, as new technology and bandwidth demand grows, so will the ways that Emulex “Connects the Cloud.”

---

¹Source: IDC: IDC Predictions 2012: Competing for 2020 (#231720, December 2011)
²Source: ESG Research Report, Cloud Computing Adoption Trends, May 2011.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments

Recently, we celebrated the opening of our new Austin office, in the heart of ‘Silicon Valley of the South,’ as part of our strategy to create centers of excellence across the globe that focus on specific product lines and technology areas. Creating these centers of excellence is part of our strategic operating plan and our focused efforts on continuing to grow our 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) market share, and technology growth in hardware, management, software and shared networking technologies. The Austin office is focused on 10GbE ASICs, Pilot3, and emerging shared I/O technology as a result of the ServerEngines and Next I/O technology acquisitions. Our other centers of excellence consist of the following: Bangalore, software, drivers, ASIC verification, Bolton, Mass., OneCommand Manager and OneCommand Vision software and PCI Express; Costa Mesa, Calif., Fibre Channel, integration and solutions; Hyderabad, firmware, drivers, Roseville, Calif., embedded I/O and storage products; and San Jose, Calif., 10GbE.

The grand opening event in Austin was a great success, as we were joined by our customers at Dell, HP and IBM, employees and their families as well as members of the Chamber of Commerce and representatives of local institutions, such as University of Texas and Texas State. I encourage you watch the video of our president and chief operating officer, Jeff Benck’s, opening remarks at the ceremony as well as a slideshow of pictures taken at the event.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments

Storage, much like the Universe, is ever-expanding and evolving to meet the needs of the businesses and applications it supports. According to IDC¹, the digital universe will expand by almost 50% by 2013 as we skyrocket from 1.8 zettabytes (ZB) to 7ZB, with 90% of that coming from digital content in the form of graphics and video. Digital video and image creation and replication will be the real driving force — including the impact of the transition to digital TV around the world. This is continuing to deluge networks and data centers, creating opportunities for whoever figures out how best to manage and analyze all of this unstructured information.

So what is driving this growth in the digital universe? We see these five key trends behind this growth in storage for 2012: big data, latency reduction with solid state disk flash, end-to-end management capabilities, content delivery and mobility, and the convergence of networks.

Hadoop – Big Data in the Cloud

To say that cloud usage for search, pictures, video, e-commerce and IPTV, mobile, tablet, laptops and corporate computing is driving more storage is an understatement. One of the biggest new trends it the world of data, is the growth of “Big Data,” using a new model called Hadoop. Per Wikipedia, Apache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers. Hadoop is driving the way massive data pools are being managed, searched and deployed.

Solid State Disk – Lowering the Latency

Solid State Disks (SSDs) and flash memory are being used at every layer of the IT infrastructure to accelerate applications and scale the number of concurrent users that can be supported. SSDs in the form of PCI-Express cards, flash disks and local caching is making applications such as Netflix and Facebook scale faster to support hundreds of millions of users concurrently across the globe. SSD is making storage more deliverable to leverage new networking models such as OpenFlow that are required to support this expanding storage universe. SSD technology is helping storage reach farther and faster than ever before.

Management – End-to End

In storage, the most demanding task is management. Yes, big storage numbers are getting the hype and press coverage, but if you can’t manage your storage, you may as well not deploy it. We are seeing a new generation of management tools being deployed that can see from one end of the cloud to the other. They enable developers, carriers and IT managers to provide access to storage locally and remotely acting as one integrated storage pool, which is required to support mobile and virtual computing in ways that we did not have just five years ago.

Mobility – Delivery of Content

It is not enough to have vast pools of storage, it has to be deliverable to mobile and remote devices. This is where new technology such as OpenStack help infrastructure providers move, map and optimize storage, networking and computing resources to deliver content across the globe. This is changing the way IT and service providers deploy storage for our cloud-centric world.

Network Convergence – Moving to One Wire

The other big trend is both a storage and a networking trend; network convergence. Network convergence is bringing together Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NAS, IP and clustering into a single physical layer that can be shared and optimized to make the other trends we outlined here possible. Without the right network, none of the other trends would be changing the world. The move to one wire will happen in many phases, over a number of years, but it will happen, and 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) with the new Data Center Bridging (DCB) enhancements will be the key technology to enable network convergence.

Evolving with the Expanding Storage Universe

It took mankind almost 60 years to go from 0 to 1.8ZB and to think we will almost triple the storage universe in just three years is a bit amazing, but it will happen. The technologies outlined above will be key to making it happen, together. One thing we have learned in computing is that no single technology does it all. It is a confluence of people, business opportunity, and innovative technologies up and down the stack that are required to make it all work.

---

¹IDC: IDC Predictions 2011: Welcome to the new Mainstream (December 2010)

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments

To say that much has been written about the cloud is a bit of an understatement. It is one of our most strategic market opportunities in the IT industry, and it touches almost every aspect of our business. Emulex has been working with our OEMs and cloud ecosystems partners to build the right combination of connectivity, protocols, standards and features to make sure that Emulex becomes the number one way to connect you and your business to the cloud.

So when we say “Emulex Connects the Cloud,” what do we mean? It means that Emulex technology is being used to connect, manage and optimize every layer of the cloud.

Mobile Access Layer
Everybody knows that there has been an explosion of mobile devices, whether it is a smartphone, tablet, or a laptop; cloud providers are seeing an explosion in demand for Web and Cloud Giants. At the Mobile/Access layer, Emulex’s Connect I/O Engine enables Web and Cloud Giants to optimize their network traffic based on each application type, be it search, video or e-commerce-driven, to improve data center productivity. Our ability to support and secure multiple clients on a single port will be vital for supporting both public and private clouds and regulatory and audit requirements. Our raw performance provides the required headroom for network-intensive events to improve uptime and service delivery.

SaaS, Paas, IaaS and Hybrid Delivery Layer
Emulex 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) and Fibre Channel (FC) technologies are being used at each level of the cloud. Our 10GbE technology is used to reach out to the cloud and our FC technology is used to record critical financial transactions. At the Software as a Service (SaaS) level, we use our Connect I/O engine to accelerate access and delivery of Web services. At the Platform as a Service (PaaS) level, we accelerate improved service delivery to developers with our 10GbE bandwidth and universal converged network adapter (UCNA) delivering improved performance, better uptime, and lower cost. And, at the Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) level, we help service providers and telcos deliver flexible cloud resources to keep IT costs down. Finally, we will be supporting new overlay networking technologies such as VMware Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN), which is really cloud simplification.

Servers and Clusters Layer
At this layer of the new cloud-driven data center, Emulex is delivering new software management tools such as OneCommand Vision and our vCenter management plug-in that enable IT managers to see an optimized I/O from one end of the cloud to the other. Our latest technology roadmap shows Emulex delivering low-latency technologies that open new market segments for Emulex and improve the current performance of applications and networks to provide better scalability at lower costs for IT and cloud giants.

Storage Systems Layer
Storage has been the heritage of Emulex and continue to lead this market forward with our industry leading 16Gb FC, 10/40GbE UCNAs and new multi-fabric solutions that drive the market towards network convergence. Our OneConnect UCNAs also enable and scale up the performance of new storage models commonly called “big data” based on Hadoop and other analytics used to provide competitive business intelligence that is strategically important or to simply store massive amounts of data with the largest implementations at places like Facebook, which stores 30PB of data.

As you can see, the cloud is reaching into every part of the digital world and these changes represent new opportunities and make the world ‘Emulex Connected’.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments

In February 2008, we introduced an updated market vision we called the Connectivity Continuum. In this vision, we outlined how Emulex anticipated that the market would change based on key trends related to the growth of cloud and server virtualization, the forthcoming (at the time) Nehalem family of servers, the advent of fabric-based computing models (HP, IBM, Oracle, Cisco) and the introduction of 10Gb/s Ethernet (10GbE)-based network convergence. To support this vision, we announced a series of technologies and have delivered all of them to the market during the past three years. These included:

• OneConnect – Our family of 10GbE Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) and Universal LAN on Motherboard (ULOMs) ASICs that revolutionized the converged networking category by bringing the best-of-breed 10GbE and Fibre Channel technology together on one platform. OneConnect includes key features such as vEngineTM, the first full three-protocol I/O offload engine, and our unique Pay-as-You-Go (PAYG) upgrade capabilities that enable IT to pay for just the functionality that they require.
• OneCommand Management Framework – Since the announcement of this framework, we have introduced OneCommand Manager, the first management application to unite IP, ISCSI, NAS, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Fibre Channel management into a single driver and management interface. OneCommand Vision, the industry’s first virtual I/O management application, allows IT managers to deploy, monitor and manage both physical and virtual I/O with a single set of instrumentation tools. OneCommand Manager for VMware vCenter is a new plug-in module for integrating OneCommand into VMware’s vCenter management console.

Needless to say, this is a significant set of products that has been delivered based on the vision we set three years ago. As we look forward to the next three years, we are updating our view of the future based on the changes in the market, the next generation of server technology, new cloud services models expanding use and standards related to server and network virtualization, the never-ending growth of storage and the evolutionary adoption of network convergence. Let’s review some of the key drivers of the updated Emulex Connect Architecture (ECA).

Drivers of the Emulex Connect Architecture

1. Cloud Connectivity: The cloud has evolved into two core types of deployment models, massive application services such as Google Search, SalesForce.com, iTunes, Facebook and other applications that are shared across millions or billions of users that are driving new deployment models servers, networking and storage deployed in shipping container-like pods. These new pods require simplified I/O networking that is all Ethernet-based and must work with their specific files systems and response requirement times. Second is the IT-as-a-service provider segment of deploying public and private clouds that require new modes of deploying networking in these core services, often called Platform-as-a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), require I/O networking that can support multiple clients on a shared hardware infrastructure. In these environments, new networking services that can provide virtual I/O isolation to support client privacy, security, regulatory and compliance demands are a vital new area for innovation at Emulex.
2. Virtual Networking: Although virtual Local Area Networks (LANs) and Storage Area Networks (SANs) have been available for some time, the emergence of fabric-based computing models is driving a new wave of virtual I/O capabilities. Standards groups are defining new solutions, such as Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) designed to improve the way I/O is handled in virtual servers and networks. The ultimate goal is to enhance virtual I/O density from four virtual machines (VMs) per core to upwards of 25 to 50 VMs per core. With workloads changing throughout the day, there is desire to both aggregate and disaggregate network traffic to adapt to these changing requirements.
3. Storage Universe: According to IDC¹, we will go from 1.8 zettabytes to 7 zettabytes by 2013 and 90% of the content will come from the Web in the form of graphics and video. Consider the fact that it took over 50 years to get to 1.8 zettabytes, and we are going to almost triple that in less than four years. The expanding storage universe is being driven by mobile and by VDI, by different device-centric storage and networking demands. Storage is not simply about bandwidth and IOPS; it is about how to deliver new media content to new mobile and virtual devices.
4. Network Convergence: Network convergence continues to evolve with support for new multi-hop switches, 10GBASE-T, as well as support for low-latency clustering solutions, such RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) on the horizon. The next generation of converged solutions must do more than deliver performance—they must be like a decathlete, they have to be very good at many different events, all in one package. This is one of the key drivers of our updated three-year vision.

The Emulex Connect Architecture Overview

These core changes and trends in the market have led to our updated vision, the Emulex Connect Architecture that encompasses five fundamental principles that will drive our product roadmaps for the next three years.

1. Connectivity for Cloud and Virtual Data Centers. The ECA is designed to meet the network services and management requirements for cloud and virtual data centers. The ECA must provide not only support for virtual server deployments, but also support for cloud-specific functions like traffic isolation for multi-tenant cloud service providers.
2. Virtual Network Services and Management. Virtual Network Services implies support of new and evolving virtual I/O standards, including SR-IOV, Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) and Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA). Virtual I/O support must be able to adapt to the specific requirements of OEMs who are defining their own architecture based on these standards. Additionally, the ECA must extend beyond the Fibre Channel and Ethernet physical infrastructure to include those management services required for IT organizations to effectively perform day-to-day deployment, management, optimization and troubleshooting in a highly virtualized data center.
3. Flexible Multi-fabric Protocol Engines. Convergence is a key technology for Emulex—the ability to consolidate storage and network traffic over a single 10GbE wire over time will be one of the key deployment models of the future. Convergence lowers capital expense (CAPEX) and operational expense (OPEX) by saving money on adapters, switches, power and cooling. However, the reality is that not all data centers are the same. The most common model today is the use of a Fibre Channel SAN for storage traffic and Ethernet LAN for network traffic.

   In 2011, a third model of convergence, the multi-fabric model has surfaced. In this model, both Ethernet and Fibre Channel are supported in the same name network device. Multi-fabric has become common in new network switches, new storage devices. A hallmark of the Emulex Connect Architecture is support for these new Converged Fabric Adapters (CFAs), providing an option for both server and storage vendors to deliver a single adapter that supports both Fibre Channel and Ethernet.

   The figure below shows the three connectivity models.

   

4. Scalable Performance and Virtual Devices. With the maturity of virtualization and the ever-increasing scalability of server technology, the ECA provides a high degree of scalability enabling not only eight or 32 virtual devices on an individual card, but I/O connectivity surpassing 250 virtual devices. The ECA includes new multi-core ASICs designed to run a combination of standard protocols and specialized functions. This multi-core architecture implements in hardware what was previously designed into firmware and allows dynamic scaling to meet horsepower requirements for a particular workload.

   In addition, the ECA enables the pooling of resources so that they may be dynamically allocated to multiple protocols. Dynamic resource management providing flexibility in the implementation of interrupts, how interrupts are assigned, virtual functions, simultaneous TCP/IP connections, logins per initiator port, completion queues, exchanges, N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) and XRI ports provides a quantum jump in terms of multiprotocol scale-out with support for up to 256 VMs and 2000 simultaneous TCP/IP sessions.

5. Emulex Enterprise-class Reliability. Hand-in-hand with a highly virtualized deployment model is the need for industrial strength reliability and security. The ECA goes beyond standard ECC and parity to new data integrity features, such as support of the T10-PI standard. Emulex BlockGuard™ technology ensures the integrity of user data as it is transferred from the application throughout the SAN, eliminating silent data corruption, which can happen when applications read from or write to storage devices. End-to-end data integrity assures the validity of I/O operations through the exchange of “verification information” during data transmissions.

The Proof Is in the Deliverables

On May 2, we announced that our first Converged Fabric ASIC and cards have been sampling to OEMs and we have multiple design wins for host, target and appliance applications based on the new XE201 I/O Controller technology. On May 9 at EMC World, Emulex will hold the first public demonstration of our 16Gb Fibre Channel technology, and that same week at Interop, also in Las Vegas, we will do the first public demonstrations of 10GBASE-T UCNAs and 40GbE UCNAs. These are key proof points on the path to delivering the next generation of I/O technology for cloud and virtual data centers. As we did in February 2008, we told you what our vision was and what we would deliver and we did just that. This week, we told you the next step in our plans based on the ECA. Next week, we are showing the early proof points of those technologies and we will deliver those solutions to the market to meet the next generation of I/O demands for the market.

__

¹IDC: IDC Predictions 2011: Welcome to the new Mainstream (December 2010)

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

As we know in the technology industry, ideas are the lifeblood of our business. The power of ideas has launched some of the greatest businesses of the past century, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Emulex and dozens of others that were started with a new idea to make life, technology and business better. As we move into a more global economy where manufacturing, logistics and most physical assets have become commoditized, it is ideas, brands and services that are creating sustainable, competitive and market capitalization advantages. The growth of intangible assets as a percentage of company values reflects this growing trend and has shown a direct correlation to market capitalization value.

The chart above from Ocean Tomo shows how the growth of intangible assets has reached up to 80% of the value of companies. These assets include patents, brands and other good will. Ocean Tomo created the Ocean Tomo 300 Patent Index fund to identify and invest in companies with the best ideas. The Ocean Tomo 300® Patent Index (OT300) is the industry’s first index based on the value of intellectual property and represents a diversified portfolio of 300 companies that own the most valuable patents relative to their book value.

Recently, Emulex was added to the Ocean Tomo 300® Patent Index mutual fund that tracks and invests in companies that have growing patents, intellectual property and branding value in their respective spaces. This fund has a history of spotting and investing in companies that are creating new ideas and implementing them in their market to grow company value. This is not to say that every company is not striving for these goals, but not all of them have been able to execute and capture market share to transform those ideas into market value.

In Machiavelli’s The Prince, he said you could judge a man, or company, in this case, by the quality of their enemies/competitors. I would note that Intel and Broadcom, and now Emulex, are listed among the industry leaders with the best ideas on the Ocean Tomo 300 Patent Index, while QLogic and Brocade are not listed. This is one more data point that shows how we are transitioning into a leading I/O company, not just a Fibre Channel company. Our strategy to drive network convergence with 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) first, drive innovation software such as our OneCommand Vision and gain Fibre Channel share at key technology transitions is paying off in our revenues and in the investment community.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

This is the fourth in a series of five blogs on key disruptive technologies for 2011. The first reaction I often get when I mention mobility as a disruptive technology for Emulex is, “What do you guys have to do with mobility?” The answer is simple: mobility drives massive volumes of online transactions, messages and content streaming and generates more video clips and pictures than traditional cameras do today. According to IDC¹, the storage universe sits at 1.8ZB (10²¹ bytes) and is expected to grow to 7ZB in just three years, with video and other media being 90% of this new content; mobile devices for creation and viewing are the leading cause of this demand. These transactions and messages are driving IP traffic for our OneConnect Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs), Local Area Network (LAN) on Motherboards (LOMs) and Network Interface Cards (NICs), the online transactions are driving traffic for our LightPulse Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) on Storage Area Networks (SANs) and video and pictures are driving bandwidth demands for 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE), 16Gb Fibre Channel and 40GbE pipes to support the explosion in Network-attached Storage (NAS) for file-based transfers.

• To be succinct, mobility drives traffic on every network model that Emulex supports. So, understanding what devices are using the data, where it is being delivered, how it needs to be optimized and how it needs to be managed is a key requirement to our networking plans going forward. Let take a quick look at some of the more interesting facts about the mobile market according to a recent paper from Cisco entitled ” Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010–2015”:
• 372 Million New Mobile Web-enabled Devices – Over 372 million new Web-ready devices will be bought in 2011, and that will grow as we go forward. This growth in mobility is driving new demand for network bandwidth at every level of the data centers and telco infrastructure.
• Over 50% of Web Access Will Be over Mobile Devices – Form this point forward, more Web access and content will be delivered via mobile devices than computers or laptops. This change is one of the key reasons that mobility is a disruptive technology for Emulex.
• Over 2 Billion Active Web Users in 2011, 3 Billion by 2014 – Depending on when you attribute the Web/Internet’s start date, it took at least 20 years to get 2 billion people using the Web, and we will reach 3 billion in just the next three years. This is why we are seeing the storage universe grow to 7ZB and over 90% of this new content will be for video and pictures.
• 90% of All Mobile Device Are Outside of the U.S. – This will seem obvious to the rest of the world, but maybe not to folks domestically. The real growth is in the emerging markets of the world with China, Brazil and India leading the way in new users, resources, infrastructure and applications for mobile devices.
• Driving New Data Center Models vs. Corporate – This growth in mobility, Web services, cloud computing and other network models is changing the way we build data centers for service providers and traditional IT services. They will be more scalable, use hybrid cloud models (private and public) and all be connected in ways we never thought of before, driving the need for better, faster and easier-to-manage networks.

In the end, the mobility revolution will profoundly change networking and Emulex will lead the way forward with higher bandwidth solutions for IP and storage; improved computing services by leveraging RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEE) to build server clusters; and deployment of new management tools that let you see, control, configure and virtualize network and storage traffic to provide Internet-class scalability.
__

¹IDC: IDC Predictions 2011: Welcome to the new Mainstream (December 2010)

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments

This is the third in a series of five blogs on key disruptive technologies for 2011. According to IDC¹, the storage universe sits at 1.8ZB (1021 bytes) and is expected to grow to 7ZB in just three years with video and other media being 90% of this new content. They have both Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network-attached Storage (NAS) data capacities growing at north of 50% for the next four years. Obviously, data management and the management of the data traffic pathways are going to be one of the most daunting challenges facing the data center and users of data for many years to come. This is one of the biggest opportunities for new disruptive technologies in the data center. Over the past few years, we have seen techniques such as data de-duplication become a hot technology. Obviously, storing less data is one way to reduce data and help manage the growing universe of data. However, as useful as these new types of data reduction technologies are, they cannot hold back the expanding universe of data.

This ever-expanding data is driving the need for bigger network pipes, with smarter provisioning, content management and intelligent I/O management. As we look forward, we see four major data network management solutions that are needed to navigate and operate this new storage universe.

• Cloud Performance – In the cloud, we have a number of terms used to describe the types of services that are being provided to customers. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software or Storage as a Service (SaaS) are often used to describe a new way to deliver IT services. Each of these new cloud IT models relies on the ability of the network to deliver data and information with the right service-level agreements (SLAs) and security. This means that they need to have software and management tools that can work across multiple types of networks and negotiates resources in new ways on new devices anywhere on the planet. This is highest level of the new network and data management tools that need to be developed. Emulex is working with cloud providers, telcos, service providers and OEMs to deliver tools that make these seamless multi-tenant networking solutions work from a single pane of glass.
• Virtual I/O – One of the core technologies for the cloud and next-generation data centers is virtualization. While virtualization enables data center consolidation and many other key trends, like every new technology, it creates new management challenges. Emulex is leading the trends and solutions in virtual I/O to make the cloud and data center more efficient. This includes supporting new technology solutions, such as area vSwitches, virtual Network Interface Cards (vNICs) and virtual Converged Network Adapters (vCNAs). This includes support for VEB and VEPA standards that will drive advanced virtual I/O requirements. Our OneCommand Manager helps virtual fabrics from every major OEM, OS and Hypervisor provider easily map virtual connectivity to physical devices to provide a simple and easy- to-manage virtual I/O environment.
• I/O Management – When you move into Virtual I/O, you need dedicated tools to provide virtual I/O management, and our OneCommand Vision application allows you to drive I/O provisioning, event tracking and services to the virtual machine (VM) level. In this highly virtualized environment, it is easy to lose track of which VM has which services and which physical device it is linked to in the server. This can become more problematic when the VM is moved across the network to another physical server. Tools such as our OneCommand Vision allow IT managers to provision resources to the VM, track the I/O usage, predict I/O bottlenecks and suggest when the VM needs to be moved to meet SLAs.
• Storage Security – Data Security is a concern for every business. We are all familiar with the myriad of financial, regulatory and business policies that require security communications and storage of data. As VMs become the primary server deployment model in the cloud and next-generation data centers, the ability to protect data in virtual servers at the hypervisor level, across the network and at-rest is becoming required, not optional. This means that the security services need to be intelligent enough to follow the VM across multiple physical servers and networks and never lose touch with the primary storage device that holds the at-rest content. Our OneCommand Guardian can provide security for the virtual I/O operations of VMs in the cloud and in the new data center. Guardian also follows the industry best practices of protecting data at the source.

In the hardware business, we can sometimes forget how important management software is to the real-world use of our physical devices. That is why Emulex has it on the Top 5 list for 2011 and beyond. We know that having faster pipes is great, but you have to be able make them work for your infrastructures, applications and businesses to make them really work. In 2010, we introduced our first management-only services and applications with OneCommand Vision and Guardian. We will expand this family in 2011 and beyond to make sure that you can have true end-to-end visibility into I/O to drive SLAs, cost and efficiency in your IT organization.

¹IDC: IDC Predictions 2011: Welcome to the new Mainstream (December 2010)

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

This is the second in a series of five blogs on key disruptive technologies for 2011. In my last blog, we talked about cloud computing and the way it is changing how servers are deployed. I’d now like to turn attention to Flash memory/Solid State Disk (SSD). This technology is not only changing servers, it is changing almost every other device across the enterprise, including network devices, storage and mobile devices (phones, tablets and laptops). As I write this, I am using my laptop, which is SSD-based. It is cooler, faster and has survived a fair number of bumps and bruises that could have killed other systems with a spinning disk. I wanted the SSD for this laptop for one reason: to make the system boot faster. On my old system, I would have to wait up to 10 minutes to get everything to boot and load all of the things that my IT department has assured me are vital to a safe and secure network.

By moving to an SSD-based laptop, I can now boot in under one minute, and I have much better power life on my battery. This is one of the many reasons why SSDs will change the way we deploy almost everything in the data center. Systems and devices that use SSD to boot, cache and store local content are faster, have lower latency and will require faster and more diverse network connectivity. This is why we view SSDs as one of the most disruptive and pivotal technologies for the data center. At almost every level in the data center–server, access device, switch, appliance and storage–SSDs will improve performance, lower power and change the way we need to move, deliver and manage data and network traffic.

SSD and Flash-based Caching Will Change the Speed, Power and Behavior of Everything

For this blog, I don’t want to focus on the types of SSD or Flash-based Caching (FBC), the virtues of each implementation or the roadmap for SSD in the future, as many others will do this. However, we know three things about SSDs: capacities will go up, they will get faster and they will continue to reduce power demands. What I do want to focus on is the way SSDs will be used and the resulting impacts and opportunities that they introduce into the data center.

The first is speed. The way we think about the ability to scale IOPS will drastically change applications and the relationship to storage. Second, is caching and the optimized delivery of data/content over the Web, at the Telco providers and at the hosts, for things like application acceleration. Third, it can and will improve virtualization performance with improved virtual machine (VM) mobility through lower latency delivery of network data from the sources. Fourth, FBC will increase the speed of transfers through the networks, it will create faster and highly concurrent caching points, and finally, fifth, these will continue to accelerate the storage model and change the way we view tiers of storage, dedupe and replicate our data. SSDs will ripple through every single device, transfer and network connection from the vast mobile universe, the ubiquity of the cloud and down to the end storage point, across the globe. Let’s look at some of the key uses and implications for SSDs in the enterprise and for Emulex.

• Host Acceleration – In the host, FBC and host-based SSDs will be used to accelerate applications. One of the common options will be to reduce the latency to store and retrieve log data to improve database/application response time. This will drive greater scalability of the applications and increase the I/O demands on each CPU. This means that we will need smarter and faster pipes that know if the data is local, on a Storage Area Network (SAN)/Network Attached Storage (NAS) or out in the cloud. The converged data/network pipes will have the opportunity to help accelerate application performance if they know what type of data has to be clustered, moved, migrated, replicated or deduped.
• Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) – At our recent sales meeting, James Staten of Forrester spoke on the needs of the Web giants (such as Google/YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, MSN and Hulu) that all need CDNs to deliver real-time content, such as posts, text or tweets, and deliver video content that often requires up to 100 different formats based on the speed of the targeted network, the delivery platform and the media player requirements. This means that our LOMs and Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) need to have more than just virtual port (vPort) technology with quality of service (QoS), but need to provide dynamic QoS based on the connection types, the file format and end devices.
• Networks – Network convergence is one of my five disruptive technologies for 2011, and we will drill down into that in a later blog. However, SSDs and FBCs will increase the performance between systems for clustered applications and lower the latency of networking for data and storage with new technologies such as RDMA over Converged Enhanced Ethernet (RoCEE) will pave the road forward with more efficient data transfers inside the current 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) pipe. RoCEE will enable Emulex to increase the IOPS and usable bandwidth of the pipe, and expand the ability to internetwork cluster server resources. In short, more transfers, in a shorter space of time, on the same 10GbE infrastructure.
• Storage – SSDs have been helping to increase the IOPS and lower the latency of transfers in storage for years. As this technology becomes more pervasive, we will see an increased number of streams being delivered for video and other file-based technologies. You will see concurrent streams grow for CDNs, and each of these changes will place greater demands in the market for high-performance, low-latency, multi-protocol, intelligent pipes that can not only understand the needs for performance, but better understand the end device needs and formats being delivered. This means solutions like our OneCommand Vision application will be able to dynamically guide the flow of data and adjust performance parameters on the fly based on the characteristics of the network flow, the workload on the sending device/server and the anticipated needs of the receiving/end device. This means Emulex needs to do more than provide fast pipes; we have to provide smarter pipes with content-aware technology that understands the entire stack of the cloud, the data center and the end user community.

As we look at SSDs and FBCs, we can see many ways that servers, networks and storage will get faster and more efficient. This is why it is one of top five disruptive technologies for 2011 and Emulex is working on new solutions in hardware, software and services that can leverage this change in infrastructure to improve application performance, lower operating costs, create smarter pipes and simplify the management of high-performance networks.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

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 | 2 Comments