• Delivered $500M for the first time in our corporate history
• Achieved 11% Y:Y Growth
• Saw 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) reach 25% of revenue in FY Q4
• Doubled our design wins at the Intel (Romley) transition
• Overcame mother nature in Japan and Thailand
• Beat QLogic to market in 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC)
• Attacked the target market with 16FC and multi-fabric design wins
• Expanded into the High Performance Networking (HPN) market
• Realized our first software revenue for OneCommand Vision
• Advanced our strategic agenda

This list of accomplishments in FY12 could go on and on, but as I look back at this fiscal year, I hear a line from The Proclaimers song “500 Miles” that goes “…but I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more…” It does a great job of capturing exacting what FY 2013 holds for us. We have a long way to go on this strategic road, and another year of good work ahead of us. Having a great year and strong revenue results is but one step on the road, the next steps have to position us for future growth and leadership. This is why I am so pleased that the engineering team is doing a great job executing and is meaningfully advancing our strategic agenda to position our business for Romley, cloud, big data, 16GFC, 40GbE with RDMA, High Performance Computing (HPC) and other key technology markets in FY 2013.

Our strategic investments are vital to keeping Emulex relevant in the market and to drive growth in the future. Business, like many things in life, is not a destination; it is an ongoing journey that requires our entire team to keep moving in the right direction every day. I know our team is ready to walk 500 more miles…for our customers and our investors in FY 2013.

CSUF students created their sculptural representations of ‘convergence’ leveraging donated IT equipment, everything from racks, to cables, to adapters. Once they were complete, sculptures arrived en masse to our Costa Mesa office where they were on display for the first round of voting, by Emulex employees locally as well as globally (voting via our Intranet by viewing pictures and videos submitted by students). Some of these sculptures were massive! More than 400 lbs. up to 7 feet tall, and some even including electricity or video. The sculptures were even more impressive in person, so it was a real treat to see them all.

The 10 semi-finalists, as a result of employee voting, were announced on Friday, May 18, just before our May 22 Art of Convergence award ceremony and celebration. In tandem, we held a second vote publicly via our Facebook page, to determine a People’s Choice award winner. This voting process was held in tandem with the employee voting and a winner was also determined for the May 22 award ceremony. Final judging was held at the award ceremony itself by our wonderful panel of Art of Convergence judges, which included me, Dr. Joseph Arnold, College of the Arts Dean, CSUF, Jeff Benck, our president and COO, Richard Chang, Arts and Entertainment Writer/Visual Art Critic for The Orange County Register, Mike Rockenbach, our CFO, and Evan Senn, local art critic and blogger for the OC Art Blog.

We proudly announced the winners at our awards ceremony at the Center Club. The $5,000 grand prize winner was Ryan Kidder, who created ‘Cranial Convergence,’ an impressive, 7-foot tall sculpture (check out a picture here) and he also won our Facebook People’s Choice award for a much-deserved double-win for his sculpture which truly defined ‘convergence!’ The $1,000 runner-up was Mark Upson, who created ‘The Convergence Machine’ (see a picture here). We also donated $5,000 to the university directly, to help continue funding art education and $450 to the art department directly, for each vote for the People’s Choice awards CSUF.

We proudly celebrated not only the winners of the ‘Art of Convergence’ competition but the students who participated in this program at the ‘Art of Convergence’ awards ceremony and we thank the students, their families ,the faculty and Professor Jim Jenkins, in particular, for their hard work, dedication and commitment to the Art of Convergence project. If you’d like to see pictures of the award ceremony, the sculptures (pictures and video), check out our microsite here. This was an extremely successful event and community program for us and we look forward to doing something similar in the future.

The Drivers of Bigger 10GbE pipes… 4G, IPTV and Software-as-a-Service

ESG published a new report in May² saying that 33 percent of existing corporations are using some form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and that number is expected to reach 70 percent by 2014. If you combine this with 90 percent of new data being generated by photos and video (according to IDC¹), 4G networks driving content to and from smartphones and tablets, then the need for greater bandwidth is self-evident. The cloud is connected with IP and Ethernet, and while 3G/4G and wireless are the key connectivity options for edge devices (smartphones, tablets, PCs), 10GbE is becoming the way to support the resulting growing data and bandwidth demands.

Expanding Connectivity with the Cloud

Emulex’s core products have been focused on Fibre Channel for most of the past decade. Fibre Channel is still a solid market because it is the primary transaction-based network for recording financial information and credit card transactions. As more of our transactions become digital, we will see Fibre Channel maintain a solid place in the data center as the “Swiss banking of networking.” So, let’s look at a typical transaction to download a movie and how Emulex is expanding its connectivity footprint in the data center. In the diagram below, we have two primary networking domains in the cloud — Ethernet that is used to communicate and deliver content, and Fibre Channel that supports database and financial functions to do the business side of the transactions in the data center.
The good news is that as the number of digital transactions grows, the amount of Fibre Channel block storage also grows. The transactional data tends to be fixed in 4/8K blocks for each transaction, but the files being moved to deliver a movie are much bigger, sometimes 1-10GB, depending on length of the movie and the quality (Standard, HD, BlueRay, 3D). This means that for each new transaction, Emulex is connecting the ‘Swiss banking side’ with Fibre Channel, and we are now delivering the content with 10GbE. Obviously, the size and volume of the content files are bigger and need more bandwidth, hence the stronger growth opportunity in 10GbE during the next five years. Let’s look at the diagram below and see how Emulex is “connecting the cloud.”

• Step 1 – A customer is sitting at his laptop and wants to rent or buy a new movie. They use wireless or 3G/4G to log on to the website to select the movie they want. In this step of the transaction, Emulex 10GbE is connecting the telco network to the website. The website is using 10GbE to help the server and storage systems find the right movie data and let the customer know the movie is ready for purchase.
• Step 2 – The order is placed and Emulex helps in two ways. First, we again connect the telco network to the website and deliver the order information to the right web server application. Next, we move the credit card information to the financial application server and use Fibre Channel to record the financial transaction and store the credit card data on our Fibre Channel “Swiss bank” network.’ Finally, we help send the confirmation of the order back to the customer through our 10GbE connectivity on the web server that connects to the telco network.
• Step 3 – To deliver the movie, Emulex’s 10GbE connections deliver using a new technology called Hadoop that runs over 10GbE. This new technology is being used extensively at major web sites as a way to sort, manage and deliver large data files and sets very efficiently.

More Steps and More Bandwidth Delivered on Emulex Connectivity

As you can see in this example, we are not only growing with the number of cloud transactions, we are expanding our infrastructure touch points inside the data center. So, as new technology and bandwidth demand grows, so will the ways that Emulex “Connects the Cloud.”

The grand opening event in Austin was a great success, as we were joined by our customers at Dell, HP and IBM, employees and their families as well as members of the Chamber of Commerce and representatives of local institutions, such as University of Texas and Texas State. I encourage you watch the video of our president and chief operating officer, Jeff Benck’s, opening remarks at the ceremony as well as a slideshow of pictures taken at the event.

So what is driving this growth in the digital universe? We see these five key trends behind this growth in storage for 2012: big data, latency reduction with solid state disk flash, end-to-end management capabilities, content delivery and mobility, and the convergence of networks.

Hadoop – Big Data in the Cloud

To say that cloud usage for search, pictures, video, e-commerce and IPTV, mobile, tablet, laptops and corporate computing is driving more storage is an understatement. One of the biggest new trends it the world of data, is the growth of “Big Data,” using a new model called Hadoop. Per Wikipedia, Apache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers. Hadoop is driving the way massive data pools are being managed, searched and deployed.

Solid State Disk – Lowering the Latency

Solid State Disks (SSDs) and flash memory are being used at every layer of the IT infrastructure to accelerate applications and scale the number of concurrent users that can be supported. SSDs in the form of PCI-Express cards, flash disks and local caching is making applications such as Netflix and Facebook scale faster to support hundreds of millions of users concurrently across the globe. SSD is making storage more deliverable to leverage new networking models such as OpenFlow that are required to support this expanding storage universe. SSD technology is helping storage reach farther and faster than ever before.

Management – End-to End

In storage, the most demanding task is management. Yes, big storage numbers are getting the hype and press coverage, but if you can’t manage your storage, you may as well not deploy it. We are seeing a new generation of management tools being deployed that can see from one end of the cloud to the other. They enable developers, carriers and IT managers to provide access to storage locally and remotely acting as one integrated storage pool, which is required to support mobile and virtual computing in ways that we did not have just five years ago.

Mobility – Delivery of Content

It is not enough to have vast pools of storage, it has to be deliverable to mobile and remote devices. This is where new technology such as OpenStack help infrastructure providers move, map and optimize storage, networking and computing resources to deliver content across the globe. This is changing the way IT and service providers deploy storage for our cloud-centric world.

Network Convergence – Moving to One Wire

The other big trend is both a storage and a networking trend; network convergence. Network convergence is bringing together Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NAS, IP and clustering into a single physical layer that can be shared and optimized to make the other trends we outlined here possible. Without the right network, none of the other trends would be changing the world. The move to one wire will happen in many phases, over a number of years, but it will happen, and 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) with the new Data Center Bridging (DCB) enhancements will be the key technology to enable network convergence.

Evolving with the Expanding Storage Universe

It took mankind almost 60 years to go from 0 to 1.8ZB and to think we will almost triple the storage universe in just three years is a bit amazing, but it will happen. The technologies outlined above will be key to making it happen, together. One thing we have learned in computing is that no single technology does it all. It is a confluence of people, business opportunity, and innovative technologies up and down the stack that are required to make it all work.

So when we say “Emulex Connects the Cloud,” what do we mean? It means that Emulex technology is being used to connect, manage and optimize every layer of the cloud.

Mobile Access Layer
Everybody knows that there has been an explosion of mobile devices, whether it is a smartphone, tablet, or a laptop; cloud providers are seeing an explosion in demand for Web and Cloud Giants. At the Mobile/Access layer, Emulex’s Connect I/O Engine enables Web and Cloud Giants to optimize their network traffic based on each application type, be it search, video or e-commerce-driven, to improve data center productivity. Our ability to support and secure multiple clients on a single port will be vital for supporting both public and private clouds and regulatory and audit requirements. Our raw performance provides the required headroom for network-intensive events to improve uptime and service delivery.

SaaS, Paas, IaaS and Hybrid Delivery Layer
Emulex 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) and Fibre Channel (FC) technologies are being used at each level of the cloud. Our 10GbE technology is used to reach out to the cloud and our FC technology is used to record critical financial transactions. At the Software as a Service (SaaS) level, we use our Connect I/O engine to accelerate access and delivery of Web services. At the Platform as a Service (PaaS) level, we accelerate improved service delivery to developers with our 10GbE bandwidth and universal converged network adapter (UCNA) delivering improved performance, better uptime, and lower cost. And, at the Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) level, we help service providers and telcos deliver flexible cloud resources to keep IT costs down. Finally, we will be supporting new overlay networking technologies such as VMware Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN), which is really cloud simplification.

Servers and Clusters Layer
At this layer of the new cloud-driven data center, Emulex is delivering new software management tools such as OneCommand Vision and our vCenter management plug-in that enable IT managers to see an optimized I/O from one end of the cloud to the other. Our latest technology roadmap shows Emulex delivering low-latency technologies that open new market segments for Emulex and improve the current performance of applications and networks to provide better scalability at lower costs for IT and cloud giants.

Storage Systems Layer
Storage has been the heritage of Emulex and continue to lead this market forward with our industry leading 16Gb FC, 10/40GbE UCNAs and new multi-fabric solutions that drive the market towards network convergence. Our OneConnect UCNAs also enable and scale up the performance of new storage models commonly called “big data” based on Hadoop and other analytics used to provide competitive business intelligence that is strategically important or to simply store massive amounts of data with the largest implementations at places like Facebook, which stores 30PB of data.

As you can see, the cloud is reaching into every part of the digital world and these changes represent new opportunities and make the world ‘Emulex Connected’.

• OneConnect – Our family of 10GbE Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) and Universal LAN on Motherboard (ULOMs) ASICs that revolutionized the converged networking category by bringing the best-of-breed 10GbE and Fibre Channel technology together on one platform. OneConnect includes key features such as vEngineTM, the first full three-protocol I/O offload engine, and our unique Pay-as-You-Go (PAYG) upgrade capabilities that enable IT to pay for just the functionality that they require.
• OneCommand Management Framework – Since the announcement of this framework, we have introduced OneCommand Manager, the first management application to unite IP, ISCSI, NAS, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Fibre Channel management into a single driver and management interface. OneCommand Vision, the industry’s first virtual I/O management application, allows IT managers to deploy, monitor and manage both physical and virtual I/O with a single set of instrumentation tools. OneCommand Manager for VMware vCenter is a new plug-in module for integrating OneCommand into VMware’s vCenter management console.

Needless to say, this is a significant set of products that has been delivered based on the vision we set three years ago. As we look forward to the next three years, we are updating our view of the future based on the changes in the market, the next generation of server technology, new cloud services models expanding use and standards related to server and network virtualization, the never-ending growth of storage and the evolutionary adoption of network convergence. Let’s review some of the key drivers of the updated Emulex Connect Architecture (ECA).

Drivers of the Emulex Connect Architecture

1. Cloud Connectivity: The cloud has evolved into two core types of deployment models, massive application services such as Google Search, SalesForce.com, iTunes, Facebook and other applications that are shared across millions or billions of users that are driving new deployment models servers, networking and storage deployed in shipping container-like pods. These new pods require simplified I/O networking that is all Ethernet-based and must work with their specific files systems and response requirement times. Second is the IT-as-a-service provider segment of deploying public and private clouds that require new modes of deploying networking in these core services, often called Platform-as-a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), require I/O networking that can support multiple clients on a shared hardware infrastructure. In these environments, new networking services that can provide virtual I/O isolation to support client privacy, security, regulatory and compliance demands are a vital new area for innovation at Emulex.
2. Virtual Networking: Although virtual Local Area Networks (LANs) and Storage Area Networks (SANs) have been available for some time, the emergence of fabric-based computing models is driving a new wave of virtual I/O capabilities. Standards groups are defining new solutions, such as Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) designed to improve the way I/O is handled in virtual servers and networks. The ultimate goal is to enhance virtual I/O density from four virtual machines (VMs) per core to upwards of 25 to 50 VMs per core. With workloads changing throughout the day, there is desire to both aggregate and disaggregate network traffic to adapt to these changing requirements.
3. Storage Universe: According to IDC¹, we will go from 1.8 zettabytes to 7 zettabytes by 2013 and 90% of the content will come from the Web in the form of graphics and video. Consider the fact that it took over 50 years to get to 1.8 zettabytes, and we are going to almost triple that in less than four years. The expanding storage universe is being driven by mobile and by VDI, by different device-centric storage and networking demands. Storage is not simply about bandwidth and IOPS; it is about how to deliver new media content to new mobile and virtual devices.
4. Network Convergence: Network convergence continues to evolve with support for new multi-hop switches, 10GBASE-T, as well as support for low-latency clustering solutions, such RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) on the horizon. The next generation of converged solutions must do more than deliver performance—they must be like a decathlete, they have to be very good at many different events, all in one package. This is one of the key drivers of our updated three-year vision.

The Emulex Connect Architecture Overview

These core changes and trends in the market have led to our updated vision, the Emulex Connect Architecture that encompasses five fundamental principles that will drive our product roadmaps for the next three years.

1. Connectivity for Cloud and Virtual Data Centers. The ECA is designed to meet the network services and management requirements for cloud and virtual data centers. The ECA must provide not only support for virtual server deployments, but also support for cloud-specific functions like traffic isolation for multi-tenant cloud service providers.
2. Virtual Network Services and Management. Virtual Network Services implies support of new and evolving virtual I/O standards, including SR-IOV, Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) and Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA). Virtual I/O support must be able to adapt to the specific requirements of OEMs who are defining their own architecture based on these standards. Additionally, the ECA must extend beyond the Fibre Channel and Ethernet physical infrastructure to include those management services required for IT organizations to effectively perform day-to-day deployment, management, optimization and troubleshooting in a highly virtualized data center.
3. Flexible Multi-fabric Protocol Engines. Convergence is a key technology for Emulex—the ability to consolidate storage and network traffic over a single 10GbE wire over time will be one of the key deployment models of the future. Convergence lowers capital expense (CAPEX) and operational expense (OPEX) by saving money on adapters, switches, power and cooling. However, the reality is that not all data centers are the same. The most common model today is the use of a Fibre Channel SAN for storage traffic and Ethernet LAN for network traffic.

   In 2011, a third model of convergence, the multi-fabric model has surfaced. In this model, both Ethernet and Fibre Channel are supported in the same name network device. Multi-fabric has become common in new network switches, new storage devices. A hallmark of the Emulex Connect Architecture is support for these new Converged Fabric Adapters (CFAs), providing an option for both server and storage vendors to deliver a single adapter that supports both Fibre Channel and Ethernet.

   The figure below shows the three connectivity models.

   

4. Scalable Performance and Virtual Devices. With the maturity of virtualization and the ever-increasing scalability of server technology, the ECA provides a high degree of scalability enabling not only eight or 32 virtual devices on an individual card, but I/O connectivity surpassing 250 virtual devices. The ECA includes new multi-core ASICs designed to run a combination of standard protocols and specialized functions. This multi-core architecture implements in hardware what was previously designed into firmware and allows dynamic scaling to meet horsepower requirements for a particular workload.

   In addition, the ECA enables the pooling of resources so that they may be dynamically allocated to multiple protocols. Dynamic resource management providing flexibility in the implementation of interrupts, how interrupts are assigned, virtual functions, simultaneous TCP/IP connections, logins per initiator port, completion queues, exchanges, N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) and XRI ports provides a quantum jump in terms of multiprotocol scale-out with support for up to 256 VMs and 2000 simultaneous TCP/IP sessions.

5. Emulex Enterprise-class Reliability. Hand-in-hand with a highly virtualized deployment model is the need for industrial strength reliability and security. The ECA goes beyond standard ECC and parity to new data integrity features, such as support of the T10-PI standard. Emulex BlockGuard™ technology ensures the integrity of user data as it is transferred from the application throughout the SAN, eliminating silent data corruption, which can happen when applications read from or write to storage devices. End-to-end data integrity assures the validity of I/O operations through the exchange of “verification information” during data transmissions.

The Proof Is in the Deliverables

On May 2, we announced that our first Converged Fabric ASIC and cards have been sampling to OEMs and we have multiple design wins for host, target and appliance applications based on the new XE201 I/O Controller technology. On May 9 at EMC World, Emulex will hold the first public demonstration of our 16Gb Fibre Channel technology, and that same week at Interop, also in Las Vegas, we will do the first public demonstrations of 10GBASE-T UCNAs and 40GbE UCNAs. These are key proof points on the path to delivering the next generation of I/O technology for cloud and virtual data centers. As we did in February 2008, we told you what our vision was and what we would deliver and we did just that. This week, we told you the next step in our plans based on the ECA. Next week, we are showing the early proof points of those technologies and we will deliver those solutions to the market to meet the next generation of I/O demands for the market.

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¹IDC: IDC Predictions 2011: Welcome to the new Mainstream (December 2010)

The chart above from Ocean Tomo shows how the growth of intangible assets has reached up to 80% of the value of companies. These assets include patents, brands and other good will. Ocean Tomo created the Ocean Tomo 300 Patent Index fund to identify and invest in companies with the best ideas. The Ocean Tomo 300® Patent Index (OT300) is the industry’s first index based on the value of intellectual property and represents a diversified portfolio of 300 companies that own the most valuable patents relative to their book value.

Recently, Emulex was added to the Ocean Tomo 300® Patent Index mutual fund that tracks and invests in companies that have growing patents, intellectual property and branding value in their respective spaces. This fund has a history of spotting and investing in companies that are creating new ideas and implementing them in their market to grow company value. This is not to say that every company is not striving for these goals, but not all of them have been able to execute and capture market share to transform those ideas into market value.

In Machiavelli’s The Prince, he said you could judge a man, or company, in this case, by the quality of their enemies/competitors. I would note that Intel and Broadcom, and now Emulex, are listed among the industry leaders with the best ideas on the Ocean Tomo 300 Patent Index, while QLogic and Brocade are not listed. This is one more data point that shows how we are transitioning into a leading I/O company, not just a Fibre Channel company. Our strategy to drive network convergence with 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) first, drive innovation software such as our OneCommand Vision and gain Fibre Channel share at key technology transitions is paying off in our revenues and in the investment community.

• To be succinct, mobility drives traffic on every network model that Emulex supports. So, understanding what devices are using the data, where it is being delivered, how it needs to be optimized and how it needs to be managed is a key requirement to our networking plans going forward. Let take a quick look at some of the more interesting facts about the mobile market according to a recent paper from Cisco entitled ” Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010–2015”:
• 372 Million New Mobile Web-enabled Devices – Over 372 million new Web-ready devices will be bought in 2011, and that will grow as we go forward. This growth in mobility is driving new demand for network bandwidth at every level of the data centers and telco infrastructure.
• Over 50% of Web Access Will Be over Mobile Devices – Form this point forward, more Web access and content will be delivered via mobile devices than computers or laptops. This change is one of the key reasons that mobility is a disruptive technology for Emulex.
• Over 2 Billion Active Web Users in 2011, 3 Billion by 2014 – Depending on when you attribute the Web/Internet’s start date, it took at least 20 years to get 2 billion people using the Web, and we will reach 3 billion in just the next three years. This is why we are seeing the storage universe grow to 7ZB and over 90% of this new content will be for video and pictures.
• 90% of All Mobile Device Are Outside of the U.S. – This will seem obvious to the rest of the world, but maybe not to folks domestically. The real growth is in the emerging markets of the world with China, Brazil and India leading the way in new users, resources, infrastructure and applications for mobile devices.
• Driving New Data Center Models vs. Corporate – This growth in mobility, Web services, cloud computing and other network models is changing the way we build data centers for service providers and traditional IT services. They will be more scalable, use hybrid cloud models (private and public) and all be connected in ways we never thought of before, driving the need for better, faster and easier-to-manage networks.

In the end, the mobility revolution will profoundly change networking and Emulex will lead the way forward with higher bandwidth solutions for IP and storage; improved computing services by leveraging RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEE) to build server clusters; and deployment of new management tools that let you see, control, configure and virtualize network and storage traffic to provide Internet-class scalability.
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¹IDC: IDC Predictions 2011: Welcome to the new Mainstream (December 2010)

This ever-expanding data is driving the need for bigger network pipes, with smarter provisioning, content management and intelligent I/O management. As we look forward, we see four major data network management solutions that are needed to navigate and operate this new storage universe.

• Cloud Performance – In the cloud, we have a number of terms used to describe the types of services that are being provided to customers. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software or Storage as a Service (SaaS) are often used to describe a new way to deliver IT services. Each of these new cloud IT models relies on the ability of the network to deliver data and information with the right service-level agreements (SLAs) and security. This means that they need to have software and management tools that can work across multiple types of networks and negotiates resources in new ways on new devices anywhere on the planet. This is highest level of the new network and data management tools that need to be developed. Emulex is working with cloud providers, telcos, service providers and OEMs to deliver tools that make these seamless multi-tenant networking solutions work from a single pane of glass.
• Virtual I/O – One of the core technologies for the cloud and next-generation data centers is virtualization. While virtualization enables data center consolidation and many other key trends, like every new technology, it creates new management challenges. Emulex is leading the trends and solutions in virtual I/O to make the cloud and data center more efficient. This includes supporting new technology solutions, such as area vSwitches, virtual Network Interface Cards (vNICs) and virtual Converged Network Adapters (vCNAs). This includes support for VEB and VEPA standards that will drive advanced virtual I/O requirements. Our OneCommand Manager helps virtual fabrics from every major OEM, OS and Hypervisor provider easily map virtual connectivity to physical devices to provide a simple and easy- to-manage virtual I/O environment.
• I/O Management – When you move into Virtual I/O, you need dedicated tools to provide virtual I/O management, and our OneCommand Vision application allows you to drive I/O provisioning, event tracking and services to the virtual machine (VM) level. In this highly virtualized environment, it is easy to lose track of which VM has which services and which physical device it is linked to in the server. This can become more problematic when the VM is moved across the network to another physical server. Tools such as our OneCommand Vision allow IT managers to provision resources to the VM, track the I/O usage, predict I/O bottlenecks and suggest when the VM needs to be moved to meet SLAs.
• Storage Security – Data Security is a concern for every business. We are all familiar with the myriad of financial, regulatory and business policies that require security communications and storage of data. As VMs become the primary server deployment model in the cloud and next-generation data centers, the ability to protect data in virtual servers at the hypervisor level, across the network and at-rest is becoming required, not optional. This means that the security services need to be intelligent enough to follow the VM across multiple physical servers and networks and never lose touch with the primary storage device that holds the at-rest content. Our OneCommand Guardian can provide security for the virtual I/O operations of VMs in the cloud and in the new data center. Guardian also follows the industry best practices of protecting data at the source.

In the hardware business, we can sometimes forget how important management software is to the real-world use of our physical devices. That is why Emulex has it on the Top 5 list for 2011 and beyond. We know that having faster pipes is great, but you have to be able make them work for your infrastructures, applications and businesses to make them really work. In 2010, we introduced our first management-only services and applications with OneCommand Vision and Guardian. We will expand this family in 2011 and beyond to make sure that you can have true end-to-end visibility into I/O to drive SLAs, cost and efficiency in your IT organization.

¹IDC: IDC Predictions 2011: Welcome to the new Mainstream (December 2010)