I’m sure we’ve all heard some of these staggering internet and data statics that are making the rounds, right? Something along the lines of…

• 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (source)
• 8 trillion text messages were sent in 2011 (source)
• An estimated 100 billion photos have been posted on Facebook (source)
• Twitter logs over 250 million tweets per day (source)
• We create 2.5 quintillion (2.5 x 10^18 ) bytes of data on a daily basis (source)
• 90% of the data in existence today has been created in the last two years (source)

For a little perspective, IDC has said that it has taken almost 60 years for disk drives to reach 1.7 zettabytes (ZB) of data in the Storage Universe and they expect that to almost quintuple to more than 8ZB by 2015. They also predict that 90% of this new data will be video and pictures¹.

The sheer scale of this boom in data growth, and the sources driving it, such as consumer participation in the web, social media, mobile applications, credit card and banking transactions, and high frequency trading, just to name a few, show no signs of slowing down.

In the traditional sense, “Big Data” has been used to describe massive amounts of data controlled and analyzed by huge organizations like Google. Below that echelon of organizations, “Big Data” is a relative term, proportionate to the size of an organization. Regardless of size, sector, or vertical, the exponential growth of data and focus on data analytics has prompted companies to adopt Hadoop – to uncover new and valuable information from unstructured data sets, and turning that into a competitive advantage for their business.

The proliferation of data, and data sources, is exactly why this topic is growing in popularity – it relates to the core of the emerging models that tackle the analysis of this massive data growth. Emulex OneConnect® 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) Network Adapters eliminates the performance bottleneck imposed on Hadoop clusters by traditional 1GbE networks, unlocking the full potential of today’s servers. When combined with OneCommand™ Vision, Emulex is able to provide administrators with the most efficient and scalable solution for maximizing the performance of their Hadoop clusters.

Our new Big Data Solution Site arms you with the resources you need as you move forward with I/O connectivity and management deployments to manage massive amounts of data in your organization. We offer a whitepaper detailing OneConnect 10GbE adapter performance improvements over 1GbE connections as well as a whitepaper on OneCommand Vision and how I/O management is critical to Big Data solutions. Links to the latest industry blogs also provide up-to-date information on what is happening in the industry.

You can also visit us in Booth #522 at the upcoming Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara next week, and learn first-hand what Emulex offers in the way of cloud computing and Big Data solutions.

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¹Source: IDC: IDC Predictions 2012: Competing for 2020 (#231720, December 2011)

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A few years back, the world as I knew it got rocked to the core. No, I didn’t lose a loved one to a sudden and unexpected illness, nor did I find out my wife was leaving me for the pool guy (even though I don’t have a pool, let alone a jacuzzi) but you get the point. In my mind, this catastrophe was on par with something just as cataclysmic … I lost my entire library of digital music due to a dead hard-drive. Over 10,000 of my beloved songs ranging from “Hungry like the Wolf” by Duran Duran to “Nothing But a G Thang” by Dr. Dre vanished within the blink of any eye. Having worked in the data storage industry for years, I had no one to blame but myself for not diligently following a data backup policy. It took me about two months of painstaking labor to rebuild my library from scratch … oh well, live and learn right? Well, I can tell you that was the first and last time it ever happened because I discovered a little thing called “The Cloud.”

So what is the cloud? In the most simplistic of terms, the cloud is as old and simple as the Internet itself. The cloud is really just about accessing storage or software remotely from a computer via the Internet. However, as simple as it may seem, the cloud is big business.

Keep in mind, when you start talking about the cloud being deployed in data center environments, the benefits it provides increase tenfold. This leads me to talking about Cisco’s recent announcement on February 1, which further validated their commitment to help customers build intelligent infrastructures ready to support cloud-based environments.

According to the Cisco® Cloud Index, more than 50 percent of computing workloads in data centers will be cloud-based by 2014, and global cloud traffic will grow more than 12 times by 2015, to 1.6 zettabytes per year – the equivalent of more than four days of business-class video for every person on Earth. Based on these trends, Cisco announced it updated its switching portfolio with 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GE) and 40GE capabilities, the next speed limits for networking. These new capabilities provide a holistic architectural approach across campus, data center and service provider environments, and give customers a significant advantage while addressing emerging trends like cloud, video, mobility, and the proliferation of 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE).

With this announcement, Cisco, which already offers one of the industry’s broadest switching portfolio, becomes a key provider of 1/10/40/100GbE and converged networking switching solutions. Supporting the transition to higher networking speeds, in addition to Cisco’s recently announced CloudVerse solution, is a key element of Cisco’s strategy to help its customers meet the demands of emerging cloud computing trends and the resulting data deluge.

Cisco is delivering investment protection with 40GbE performance options to its Catalyst 6500 switching line, and 40 GE and 100 GE capabilities in its Nexus 7000 portfolio for interconnecting data centers to service providers. To expand its campus aggregation and data center top of rack switching, Cisco also announced two new fixed-configuration platforms that provide high-density 10GbE switching. Making it easy to use this capacity, Cisco announced simpler network virtualization functionality for its Catalyst 6500, 4500 and Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 1000 product lines with a new technology called Easy Virtual Network. They also added scalable virtual services with a new Nexus 1010-X appliance for the data center. Together, these enhancements will help businesses scale their networks, simplify operations, and protect their existing Cisco switching investments – many of which have been deployed for a decade or longer. Cisco recently reached switching milestones of 10 million deployed 10GbE switched ports since 2002, and 23,000 NX-OS customers, the operating system that supports Cisco’s entire data center portfolio.

And where does Emulex fit into all of this? Emulex has worked closely with Cisco to ensure that our Emulex OneConnect 10GbE LAN on motherboard (LOM) and 10GbE Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) are fully compatible and maximize IT managers’ investments in their Nexus and MDS infrastructure. So, whether you or your customer are looking for an answer on a Massively Scalable Data Center, Private/Hybrid Cloud, Big Data, High Frequency Trading or a traditional Data Center, Cisco and Emulex have the solution for you.

In closing, my updated library of digital music has grown to about 15,000 songs since that traumatic incident a few years back. Granted, now that I have three boys under the age of five, the spectrum of musical tastes ranges from everything Disney to Justin Bieber (God help me). However, at the end of the day, I can go to bed in peace with the sublime knowledge that if one of my twin boys decides to projectile vomit on my laptop (and also manages to hit my external hard drive three feet away), I have nothing to worry about. Sure, my $2,500 Mac will be fried into oblivion and I’ll need to bust out my carpet cleaner for the umpteenth time.

What matters most is I’ll be dreaming peacefully about my library of digital songs being nice and safe … nestled in the cloud, with an army of server storage standing sentry over them every night ready to do battle with a bad hard drive (or vomit for that matter).

For more information on Cisco’s recent announcement please visit:

http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=657081
http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-switching-leadership-and-innovations/

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Author: Kati Bell

Here’s an interesting dilemma out there in the real world: more and more data centers are outsourcing their entire on-premise storage infrastructure to a third-party. In talking with some industry folks, it turns out that this is a scary proposition. What’s needed is a fresh approach to storage performance monitoring, one that lives in the client’s domain and not the third-party’s domain. Emulex OneCommand Vision does just this, allowing the benefits of outsourced storage, while maintaining control. Check out what our customers are doing.

To enable our customers to have increased control over external or internal storage operations, we have recently added cutting edge LUN service level agreement (SLA) management to OneCommand Vision version 2.1, allowing administrators to establish LUN SLAs that consider throughput, I/O operations per second (IOPS), path availability and I/O latency. These new LUN SLA enforcement capabilities enable monitoring and reporting services tailored for private or public cloud deployments.

OneCommand Vision 2.1 also delivers support for IBM AIX Power and role-based management and GUI data export, allowing users to save data in PDF and CSV formats. New intelligent event decoding has also been added, starting with support for SCSI check condition and RSCN events.

In addition to support for IBM AIX Power, Vision 2.1 also includes expanded OS and hypervisor support for the following
Hypervisor Enabled OS:

• IBM AIX
• Linux KVM
• Oracle Solaris
• VMware ESX
• Window Hyper-V

Non-Hypervisor Enabled OS:

• Linux (Redhat, SuSE, Oracle)
• Windows

To learn more about OneCommand Vision, please visit us at Emulex.com/vision and let us know what you think of these new enhancements. Or, join our webcast on 2/15 on “OneCommand Vision 2.1 : Cutting edge LUN SLAs, AIX on PowerPC and flexible data export options put YOU in control”, to learn more!

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Emulex has announced availability of the “twisted sisters” of the OneConnect 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) product family. The two adapters are the OCe11102-NT network adapter and the OCe11102-IT iSCSI adapter with full protocol offload.

These adapters support 10GbE connectivity using industry-standard Cat 6 and Cat 6a twisted pair cabling, and standards-based 10GBASE-T technology. There are several key benefits that make these adapters a great solution for many data centers:

• Work with commonly used twisted pair Cat 6 and Cat 6a cabling
• Lower costs when compared to optic cabling
• Longer cable runs when compared to direct attach copper (DAC) cabling
• Backward compatible with 1GbE networks to “future-proof” servers during the migration to 10GbE
• Based on market-leading, award-winning Emulex OneConnect 10GbE network technology

Detailed product information has been posted on the Emulex web site on our landing pages: OCe11102-NT and OCe11102-IT. Contact your Emulex sales representative, favorite reseller or distributor to learn more.

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Most virtualization deployments rely on storage area networks (SANs) for flexible shared storage solutions to meet mobility, performance, scalability and efficiency requirements. As many data centers take the next steps in virtualizing big I/O applications, like databases, and move to more scalable private clouds, storage networking has become the primary bottleneck for Quality of Service (QoS) and scalability.

The new Emulex LightPulse16G Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) fix that bottleneck, enabling the best QoS for the highest virtual machine (VM) density with the fewest ports and cables and the lowest power footprint.

Additionally, the entire SAN fabric benefits from higher availability and reduced power requirements leveraging a faster HBA. Because of better performance as well as streamlined management and backward compatibility, Emulex 16GFC HBAs is the best solution for virtualized environments. Here is what you can expect when upgrading to Emulex 16GFC HBAs:

• 5x the IOPS
• Twice the data throughput
• Cuts application I/O response time in half
• Up to 4x the IOPS for typical 4K/8K I/O block database applications
• 3x the IOPS performance per watt
• Maximum VM density with increased N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) virtual ports (vPorts)
• True cloud scalability, with support for up to 255 virtual functions and 1024 MSI-X and 8192 logins and open exchanges for maximum VM density—up to 4x more than other 16GFC adapters
• Unmatched native manageability with Emulex OneCommand Manager for VMware vCenter – enables adapter management directly from the vCenter console, delivering 2x adapter management functionality and taking half the time to install and manage compared to other adapters
• End-to-end data integrity with BlockGuard™ hardware offload – supports
  the T10 Protection Information (T10-PI) standard to protect against silent
  data corruption, without the 30-40% performance tax incurred by other
  firmware-based T10-PI solutions

If you’d like to learn more about 16GFC technology, join our webcast next week that will be presented by industry veteran and analyst, Seamus Crehan, principal of Crehan Research. The webcast will cover drivers for the 16GFC transition and the impact of virtualization and upcoming server refresh cycles on the overall SAN market. Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing at Emulex, will also participate in the webcast. Click here to register for the webcast on January 25th at 9am. Come armed with your questions!

Click here to Download the paper

*Performance numbers compared to Emulex 8GFC adapters.

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By John Cedillo, Emulex

IT administrators are faced with an enormous number of hardware and software solutions. In fact, using the simplified diagram below, which is far from being a comprehensive set of choices that exist in designing data centers, there are 42,120 different configuration possibilities – and this doesn’t even begin to consider the various appliances that would connect into the data/storage networks, or the applications that will sit on top of the operating systems. From one end to the other, there is a common reliance on the storage and networking controllers themselves, which is why we at Emulex strive to be the leader in ecosystem interoperability.

Navigating these design considerations is a pervasive challenge – from administrators selecting upgrade paths for their existing data centers, to organizations planning brand new data center installations. Thoughtful and informed planning is an essential step to combat and alleviate the complexity associated with disparate vendor systems within a data center, and eliminate downtime.

With the leadership position that Emulex has taken with pushing new technologies into the mainstream, combined with the unique position that our LightPulse® and OneConnect™ adapters occupy in the data center, it was the ideal time to redesign our interoperability database in an effort to provide our customers with the data they need to make informed storage and networking decisions.

We have created two “entry points” for our interoperability tool.

The first method allows a user to search for product interoperability based on a combination of Speed and Protocol – once selecting a Protocol from a Speed grouping, the user can quickly locate which server and storage OEMs have tested and integrated Emulex adapters into their respective product offerings. Selecting the desired OEM from the Partner column will allow the user to quickly identify the OEM’s hardware family and orderable part number.

The second method allows a user to search for product interoperability based on a specific Partner within grouped product lists – providing a complete listing of all Emulex products that have tested and certified interoperability with that partner’s hardware portfolio. (i.e. HP Servers, Extreme Networks 10GbE Switches, Cisco FC Switches, etc.)

No matter the entry method you choose, we’ve added some informational high points that we think will be useful and informative.

We’re proud of the enhancements that we put into our interoperability tool, and we feel that these changes will be helpful to you. That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t continue to improve upon these changes, and it is in that spirit, that we ask for your comments or suggestions for improvement. Please email us at InteropMatrix@Emulex.com – we look forward to hearing your feedback.

If you are interested in learning how to go about working with Emulex on interoperability and certification testing, please contact me at John.Cedillo@Emulex.com – we are eager to work with ecosystem partners!

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It’s taken a while, but we’re seeing the transition to 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) reach critical mass. Next-generation, high-performance servers are enabling higher virtualization ratios and driving demand for increased bandwidth. The economy has been tough on budgets, but lower prices for adapters and switches are making 10GbE much more affordable.

With basic economics of price and demand working in the right direction, there are critical questions on how to make the best use of 10x bandwidth:

• How can I conform with best practices for server virtualization?
• How can I ensure critical virtual machines get needed bandwidth?
• How can I optimize network and storage traffic that are sharing the same infrastructure?

Emulex has introduced Universal Multi-Channel (UMC) as a key technology that works with OneConnect OCe11102 10GbE adapters to answer all of these questions. With UMC, each physical port can be partitioned into four separate Network Interface Cards (NICs) functions with a unique MAC address and virtual LAN (VLAN) assignment. There’s also the option to support iSCSI or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) traffic with full protocol offload on one of the functions.

Instead of installing eight 1GbE NICs with all the related cables and switch ports, you can use one dual-port OCe11102 adapter with eight NIC functions and a default bandwidth of 2.5Gb per function. That gives you the flexibility and scalability to truly leverage your investment in 10GE.

Want to know more?

We’ve posted a new installment of our Solution Implementer’s Series with details on how to deploy UMC for best results: Deployment Guide: UMC for OneConnect OCe11102 Adapters.

You can also view a video presentation below by Saurabh Sureka, a technology expert from our engineering team, that highlights the capabilities and benefits that UMC provides.

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The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. UEFI is an important standard used everyday around the globe. Emulex has collaborated with Intel for nearly ten years on driver development for their Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) in a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) using this standard as it has evolved. Intel’s recent Intel Technology Journal features UEFI articles by Emulex, IBM and Intel, that discuss background, architecture and development tips for this UEFI.

Emulex offers UEFI development insights

Emulex engineers Terry Kirch and Al Rickey, provide their UEFI development insights for this Intel publication. Beginning with the Itanium® servers, Emulex developed the “legacy” (X86) driver. With Emulex’s expertise adding to the driver development process, the X86 boot process quickly evolved to EFI, with monolithic driver architecture developed that combined Block I/O, SCSI I/O and SCSI pass-through direct. As EFI evolved, Emulex took a lead role in replacing the X86 driver with the EFI (1.10) driver. Most recently, Emulex developed the HII driver, based on UEFI 2.x, for its HBAs.

Read this interesting article by Al and Terry, beginning on page 57, for some historical background information, mixed with current development tips. It will change the way you look at your driver installation the next time you install an Emulex adapter.

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