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.

I will let you read the paper to get the full story, but the key point here is that network convergence makes sense for many IT departments because it has a simple story: do more work with less stuff. Last week, HP announced their new FlexFabric product line that includes the industry’s first 10GbE network convergence LAN on Motherboard (LOM), based on Emulex OneConnect™ technology. This is a key event for the network convergence world; when you see the LOM market go toward network convergence, you will then see the industry go that way. Also, nothing says use less stuff on the server like getting network convergence at the LOM level. This week, we announced that Cisco is shipping our OneConnect UCNAs on their UCS blade and rack platforms; they join Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hatachi Data Systems, HP, IBM and NetApp as major server and storage vendors shipping and support 10GbE-based network convergence.

In the end, the only thing that matters about network convergence is that IT managers are buying it (literally, not intellectually) and this paper helps show that the transition has begun, not because vendors say so, but because IT departments say so and they are speaking with their purchase orders and installations.

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