Okay, I really don’t have a tie-in for the Kate Plus 8 thing. I have never watched the show, but I read People Magazine. Sad, but true. However, it gave me a title with “8” in it, so I was happy. Also, I am sure some Fibre Channel customers feel a bit like Kate, jilted by their vendors who have fallen in love with network convergence and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). While I have certainly got up on the network convergence soapbox, it does not mean that we have abandoned Fibre Channel. In fact, we continue to make significant investments in Fibre Channel, including our new 8Gb encryption Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), OneCommand Vision software for I/O management and our new 16Gb products coming to a Storage Area Network (SAN) near you next year.

In October, we announced the industry’s first 16Gb Fibre Channel HBA design win with IBM. While it won’t ship until CY2011, it shows our long-term commitment to Fibre Channel technology and innovation. Key new technologies such as PCI Express 3.0, Encryption, SR-IOV and MR-IOV will continue to drive Fibre Channel forward for years to come. Emulex is leading the market with solutions in these spaces and working with our ecosystem partners to deliver these solutions.
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“To offload or not to offload?” That is the question that many 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) Network Interface Card (NIC) vendors are asking IT managers to answer.

So here is the story…Intel and other NIC-only vendors are asking IT managers to run software initiators for iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Their claim is that with all of the new CPU cores on next-generation servers, dedicating a few CPU cores to I/O is not a big deal and they will even tell you that it “makes sense.” However, let’s take a step back for a minute. Before server virtualization, I might have gone along with software initiators because a single application did not max out the CPU cores, so it did not matter. Then server virtualization came along and we started running three to four virtual machines (VMs) per CPU cores and this is when things began to change. Now, according to a presentation delivered by IDC in November 2008, we are moving to 10 to 12 VMs per CPU core. What is driving all of this? Data center consolidation.

The goal of maximizing the number of VMs has become a top priority for IT managers in their consolidation efforts and using CPU cores for I/O seems to be at odds with their key goals.
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So, you have heard all of the vendors in this business pontificate about the benefits or detriments of network convergence, including yours truly. But today, I’m glad to talk about a report from the Taneja Group, where they actually spoke to some people who have done some early deployments of network convergence because…it just made sense. In this paper, we have the typical preamble of the problems network convergence solves, why IT should deploy it and all of the other things you would expect to hear. However, unlike most of the other papers shipped to us vendor types to date, this one has some real customer input. What you will hear a few recurring themes from the customers in their stories: less stuff saves money (CAPEX, OPEX), and less stuff means lower power and fewer cables. This is not rocket science; it is common sense. Ben Franklin would be proud.

As they said on Dragnet, the stories you are about to see are real, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent. As many of you know, legal departments hate to let their IT folks do testimonials, so we have described them, not named them. That being said, here are the profiles of the customers:

1. Major Server Vendor – This vendor has revenues over $50 billion and “data centers the size of football fields”, and they chose to deploy network convergence to reduce power and cooling with less cards and switches and to reduce cable chaos.
2. A Major Retail Organization – The retail organization serves the U.S. armed forces and their families across the globe. They deployed network convergence to get better security, and yes they still kept their Fibre Channel systems for storage. But they wanted a path toward convergence over the next five years as they begin to move to 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE). However, the overriding concern was that they picked a solution that was open and did not lock them into a single vendor.
3. A Small Regional Hospital – They are located in a major ski resort area and see significant spikes in demand for services during the winter sports season. They recently reduced 60 physical servers into 11 physical servers running ESX and network convergence. Given the file-oriented nature of their business, they need better network-attached storage (NAS) performance and want to buy less stuff to get it. A network convergence solution was just what the doctor ordered…sorry, I could not resist.

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Other than the Olympic Games, no other event brings the world together like the World Cup. It is a connection that spans almost every demographic. It crosses race, gender, politics and age groups, and connects all of us, even us Americans who are now getting a clue a about soccer…er, football. Okay, we are still working on the name thing. Right after I had this thought, I was on the Nike site thinking about ordering a U.S. team shirt when I saw this one and I had to order it. I laughed at first, but it showed how we are connecting with the rest of world and learning to merge and converge.

It is on the theme of merging and converging that I wanted to focus for this blog. In some ways, this reminds me of the management groups of IP and storage coming together. They have heard of each other, they share a data center, but they really don’t know the rules of each other’s games and they use the same words that mean very different things to one another. Each of these teams has built a specialized set of skills for playing their respective games and many overlap, but they are still very different games.
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Two of the key questions facing IT managers are whether or when to converge. We have posted many blogs on the pending move to network convergence and have been asked by many people, “Why do you think we should move to convergence?”, “Prove to me that it works” and “Show me the money (ROI and TCO)”. The bottom line being…why does this make sense? We posed that question to ESG’s Bob Laliberte and asked him to write up his thoughts on the subject, and he developed the following paper, “Network Convergence in the Data Center Makes Sense.”

In thinking about this question, Bob started by pointing out what the top IT priorities were for 2010. The table below shows what IT is thinking about and provides a basis for why network convergence in the data center makes sense. Look at the top items: “Increase use of server virtualization,” “Data center consolidation” and “Upgrade network infrastructure.” The move to network convergence can help them address three of the top four priorities with increased used of virtual I/O solutions, such as Cisco UCS, HP Flex-10/Virtual Connect and IBM’s Virtual Fabric Solution, which will upgrade their networking infrastructure to 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE), increase the flexibility of host connectivity with virtual network interface cards (NICs) and Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs), and the list goes on. Continue reading…

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As I write this blog, it is the day after Cinco de Mayo, and I spent many hours in front of a blender, thinking about Jimmy Buffet and how I can change my latitude, when Steve Duplessie came to my mind. I am sure he will be as disturbed as I was at that revelation. However, the point of this somewhat foggy flashback is the term he coined, “The I/O Blender,” referring to what happens when you take a bunch of virtual machines (VMs) with varying levels of I/O demands and dump them onto a single physical server, swirl them together and hope that it all comes out smooth and delicious, versus a clumpy science project.

Avoiding this kind of mixology is exactly what Emulex’s OneCommand Vision was designed to help you avoid. Vision is a unique product with some unique origins. Unlike most products that are designed to fill a market need, this started out in life as a testing tool for our Design Verification Test (DVT) engineers. When server virtualization came along, we needed a way to see what individual performance of each VM was while testing N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV). Then people asked if it could be updated to test latency between the VM and adapter, and then the VM and switches, and then VM and target, and you get the idea. As we were working with OEMs and ecosystem partners, we used the tools to help optimize performance and find issues, and before you know it, the proverbial star was born, and it became the OneCommand Vision product. Continue reading…

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You have heard many people at Emulex and most other vendors who sell 10Gb/s Ethernet (10GbE) gear talk about the move to 10GbE. However, we wanted to take this opportunity to share some input from the customer community. We commissioned IT Brand Pulse to reach out to their database of Ethernet customers and ask them why they are moving or considering moving to 10GbE as they make their plans for 2010 and beyond. I don’t think the results will be a big surprise to most, but sometimes a little confirmation is a good thing.

First, let’s look at some market data. According to a February 2010 report from the Dell’Oro Group, the 10GbE server adapter market will grow from $180 million to $775 million by 2013. As we know, when you solve one bottleneck in the IT world, it simply moves somewhere else in the data center. In the never-ending game of leapfrog between CPU speeds and I/O, the CPU guys have just made a big move. There are four primary driving forces of the transition to 10GbE. Continue reading…

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One of the arguments that detractors of network convergence like to use is that network convergence will require IT shops to rip and replace equipment. The odd thing is this argument even comes from some vendors selling network convergence gear, but we will save that topic for a future blog. As I said in my last blog, IT shops are not going to rip-and-replace, they will add and extend when it comes to network convergence. As we all know IT shops tend to run their product lifecycles on 3-4 year amortization schedules and then move on to the next-generation of servers, CPUs, storage and networking. The move to network convergence and 10Gb/s Ethernet (10GbE) will not be any different, so the argument about rip-and-replace is not relevant. Continue reading…

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As many of you know, Emulex is a strong proponent of network convergence. However, we recognize that the move to network convergence is going to be about what you put in next…not rip and replace. I have seen some dialogue online in the blog-o-sphere, twitter-verse and the vendor FUD-o-rama about how network convergence will require rip and replace: “if it works don’t fix it, “you don’t need convergence,” and the FUD goes on. Emulex does not believe IT managers are going to rip and replace to add 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) or network convergence to the data center. We do think that IT managers are at a crossroads. We see three major choices for them in 2010: Continue reading…

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This week, we announced two new design wins with EMC, one for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and one for 10Gb iSCSI. We are thrilled with the EMC endorsement of our OneConnect FCoE technology, but perhaps the most interesting part of this announcement is that it’s our first design win for 10Gb iSCSI. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recently published a report on the growing adoption of iSCSI in the market and why it is appealing to IT managers (Mark Peters, Bill Lundell and John McKnight, “iSCSI SAN Adoption Update,” January 2010). The biggest surprise in this report might be the adoption level in larger enterprises (over 20,000 employees): 37% of enterprise IT mangers said they currently use iSCSI, and another 24% are planning to use iSCSI in the next year. This iSCSI usage level is between 11% and 13% higher than that of smaller organizations.

Traditionally, many people in our industry have positioned iSCSI as a small/medium business (SMB) play. However, as the market moves toward 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) on the latest Intel Nehalem EX servers, server virtualization will continue to drive I/O aggregation demands and network consolidation based on iSCSI or FCoE. To date, EMC, NetApp and Dell have all announced 10Gb iSCSI support. In the ESG survey, consolidation, cost and supporting server virtualization implementations top the list of reasons why enterprises lead deployment of this class of storage. Continue reading…

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