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.

As Emulex looks into the iSCSI market, we see a natural fit for 10Gb IP and iSCSI as a consolidation play. Too often, when we talk about consolidation, we think about IP and Fibre Channel merging together with Data Center Bridging (DCB) and FCoE. However, as we spend more time in the 10GbE world, IP, NAS and iSCSI can provide a great solution for a first step in network consolidation for many applications in the enterprise, including key applications, such as SQL, Exchange and SharePoint. Many think desktop virtualization will be a popular application for servers supporting this function for both IP and storage. As Bob Laliberte said in his blog, “Why would you buy two networks when all you need is one?” So, if it is IP and iSCSI or IP and FCoE, the net-net is that moving to a converged network will lower your deployment and management costs and simplify deployment of your next-generation servers.

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