By Art Ford, WW Field Marketing, Emulex
What a difference a year makes. This past week, I had the opportunity to attend Cisco Live 2011 in Las Vegas, where I was able to speak with many customers and partners. It is always a treat to have casual and open discussions about emerging technologies, exchange ideas with colleagues, and connect with Cisco staff about new strategies in the data center. Of course, there was a lot of discussion regarding the upcoming restructuring and layoffs. I will leave that to the financial wizards and daily bloggers.
What I would like to talk about is the dramatic change in discussion about what I heard in the 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) convergence space. Last year, the discussions centered on what a great idea convergence was and how it was something to strongly consider. Now back to my original statement, what a difference a year makes. The majority of discussion this year was about how deployment is under way or how solid the plans are for deployment of a 10GbE converged backbone in their core data center. This is a testament to the vision of data center convergence leaders like Cisco and Emulex. There are many reasons for this, for example the convergence benefits (check out our Market Mantras blog for specific examples of convergence benefits) that are provided by a broader Catalyst product portfolio and the recent announcements in the Nexus 7000 and 5000 product lines, not to mention Emulex’s own industry-leading OneConnect 10GbE Network Interface Cards (NICs) and Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) and close Cisco partnership. As Hannibal, from the A-Team show in the 80’s used to say…”I love it when a plan comes together!”
After watching John Chambers’ insightful keynote, which drove home the point on improving Cisco internal efficiencies and focusing on their core IT infrastructure businesses, we were able to enjoy three action packed days of breakout sessions and partner pavilion discussions about trends in networking for business IT and how standard Ethernet IP protocols were becoming the prevalent network for storage and virtualization.
However, lest we not forget about good old Storage Area Networks – Fibre Channel HBAs and the MDS switches they connect to. I think we all can agree they will be here for quite some time to come. In addition to all our convergence discussions, we also announced our new Cisco-branded versions of the industry-leading 8Gb Fibre Channel LightPulse HBAs. These HBAs showcase our technology leadership and are designed specifically for and deployed with MDS switches and UCS rack servers.
All in all a great week at Cisco Live in Vegas – below are a few pictures that recap the week and highlight Emulex’s presence at the event, here’s to great opportunities and success engaging with our key customers and partners!
See you next time at Cisco Live 2012 in San Diego.
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