Down to the Wire @ IBM®
One of the key elements of Emulex’s approach to this whole convergence solution is the whole point of calling it a converged network is to actually bring the same functions you had before to the table. It’s not much of a convergence if you use an ethernet cable to run your fibre channel protocol over it and do nothing else. You need to supply the same features you’ve enjoyed from your previous generation of NIC functionality and FC functionality, you’re just using a new physical layer.
At least, that’s what I thought. Then I started having people react to our solution and tell me how ‘nice’ it is we actually did something as simple as NIC Teaming. So I wanted to list out the functionality we offer on our 10Gb NIC part of the solution.
As an avid technologist I try my best to keep up with ‘the industry’. I do this by monitoring and participating (when I have time) with conversations on Twitter, following some of the best storage-related blogs on the web (Hat Tip: Scott Lowe) and in general just being a nosy person following links wherever they’ll lead me.
So back in June, QLogic asked a question about whether or not they thought encryption of data at the Fibre Channel adapter level was necessary. What interested me most about this was how they said you should buy something they don’t make in order to get the best deal. It seems counterintuitive to me for a company who makes storage networking products to say ‘this sucks, go buy it from someone else’.
Even stranger to me was that this technology they recommended wasn’t deemed ‘good enough’ by a number of customers I have met and talked about security options with storage area networks. Read the rest of this entry »
I have been extremely busy of late making sure the last few weeks of integration testing are complete and any bugs we can find are stamped out, and I’ve been unable to keep up at least a weekly cadence this month, so I thought I would blast out some commentary on a number of things that have happened here in one big consolidated post.
It appears that the appropriate sacrifices were made to the gods of computer shows and our demonstration of the eVFA adapter on the IBM BladeCenter at Storage Networking World: Europe.
Unfortunately, due to my need to be in the States to help finish up our final testing before general availability, I was unable to attend in person. Instead, I helped walk the team over the phone through enabling the adapter & getting VMware up and running.
I’ve been following vicariously through people that have gotten updates and posted their thoughts. One author, Nigel Poulton, was lucky enough to gain some nice pictures of the HS22 with the eVFA card installed in his write-up, and he touches on something I wanted to expand on a little bit in this quote:
NOTE: Of particular interest to me was the fact that the core features, as well as the base cost, of this adapter are 10Gbps Ethernet. This is very interesting when you consider Emulex are traditionally a Fibre Channel company. Clearly Emulex are moving with the market here and recognising Ethernet as the dominant technology and building on that. Emulex also have people on IEEE 802.1 committees such as DCB. Now that’s what I call not betting against Ethernet.
Last week, I talked about the main hardware features of our eVFA adapter. This week I wanted to talk about the primary feature of the card above the dual 10Gb ethernet ports, which we have been calling vNIC.
vNIC is a feature of the adapter to present multiple adapters to the operating system through the PCI Function ID of the adapter. When an operating system scans the adapter and the vNIC function is enabled through the UEFI BIOS (which is on by default) the operating system will see up to eight PCI function IDs with eight unique MAC addresses. The PCI Functions are numbered 0 – 7 and are always enumerated with functions 0,2,4,6 being assigned to Port 0 as VNIC 1 – 4, and then 1,3,5,7 being assigned to Port 1 as VNIC 1-4.
In the initial launch, you will have some basic configuration options at the card level. However, primarily you will be configuring your vNIC solution from the switch as the switch controls the virtual groups and the bandwidth assigned to each virtual NIC. The switch in this solution is provided to IBM by Blade Network Technologies. It’s their BNT 10-Port 10Gb Ethernet Switch Module. They have some detailed information similar to our pages on the IBM BladeCenter Virtual Fabric solution along with a solution brief.
The BNT switch also provides 1Gb or 10Gb connections just like the eVFA adapter does. Giving you the ability to start with 1Gb network and grow into 10Gb. You could easily provide 10Gb of bandwidth to the blades and between your IBM BladeCenters and still connect to the corporate network at 1Gb.
We will be working on a IBM Redbook that will be available when the solution ships later in October. If you have any scenarios you’d like to see discussed in the RedBook feel free to give me some ideas either here or you can e-mail me as always.
IBM and Emulex have announced the IBM BladeCenter Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter recently and I promised I’d start picking apart the features every week so that you can get an idea of what this adapter and the total BladeCenter Virtual Fabric solution can do.
I wanted to start at the easy side, and work my way into the more complex features. So the easiest side of this is that at it’s core, the eVFA (my short name for this) is the base function of the adapter. At it’s core, this adapter is a two port 10Gb Ethernet adapter with full offload functionality. So let’s take a look at that function first.
If you spent any time on the Solutions Exchange floor this week at VMworld 2009 there was one thing that was pretty clear. The Cloud has come.
What is a Cloud? It’s Cloud Computing that a lot of vendors have jumped onto whole heartedly, and with good reason, as this is where a lot of growth potential can come from.
But for the nerds on the ground, what makes cloud computing any different from a hardware perspective than the computing we’ve been doing for the last ten years, or longer?
In my sarcastic ‘been there done that’ view of the world, I say not a whole lot. Read the rest of this entry »
There is a reason I sit on an exercise ball while I’m in my home office. Some of it is because it’s supposed to give you better posture and keep you working your legs to keep yourself balanced, the other is I’ve been hopping up and down with excitement for a new product we’ve announced today in conjunction with IBM and Blade Network Technologies.
IBM today announced the Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter for IBM BladeCenter. This adapter in conjunction with the Blade Network Technologies 10-port 10G Ethernet Switch Module introduces IBM BladeCenter’s new Virtual Fabric Architecture. The eVFA Adapter is based on Emulex’s OneConnect family of Universal Converged Network Adapters (uCNA)
Recovering a little from some excitement of last week I wanted to complete a blog post I’d started. I continue to try and see what the rest of the world has to say about convergence and the market excitement around it.
Since my first post introducing my thoughts on where we stood with FCoE and it’s now been three months and there has been some ratification activity and there has been a few more independent bloggers out there that have begun to tear into the world of FCoE.
One of the most interesting things about the Intel Nehalem launch that was done at IBM was the full fledge embrace of the UEFI firmware. Almost a year ahead of the rest of the competition. In both the System x and BladeCenter space if it has Nehalem in it, it has UEFI as the firmware.
This introduces challenges to your I/O card vendors as they need to support it. There are two ways to do this, the right way, or, the wrong way. The right way involves the simple term HID. Human Interface Device. It’s a fancy engineering term for ‘make it easy to use’. One of the challenges about I/O devices in general is that the way they interact typically is not with easy to use/remember numbers. Whether it’s an IP address, a World Wide Name, or a hexadecimal memory range these aren’t things you easily remember. Read the rest of this entry »
There has been a lot of industry chatter recently about this newfangled FCoE stuff and I’ve tossed a few articles out there myself commenting on the state of the industry and all that.
However at the end of the day, in this grand scheme of things FC is still the primary solution people are working on. Sure there is some early work being done on FCoE but we still have a lot of legacy infrastructure out there to work on.
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