Emulex Blog: Emulex Labs

How Big Data Use is Helping Catch Criminals

Posted May 14th, 2013 by Sonny Singh

In the aftermath of the recent Boston Marathon terrorist attacks, I stumbled across a very interesting article by FCW which provides insight into the latest technology and IT trends being deployed by government agencies. In prior blogs, I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion how the use of “big data” seems to be proliferating more than ever. Big data is defined in simple terms as a means to gather insights from large amounts of data sets and then disseminating those insights into strategic and tactical courses of action. It is actually not surprising that big data practices are being used to help solve crimes simply because in today’s modern age of counter-terrorism, what goes on “behind the firewall” is almost as crucial as what happens at the actual crime scene.

Ultimately, the FBI investigation provided the public a glimpse of how the deployment of big data and data analytics practices is just scratching the surface towards large scale use down the road. Here is a recap of the key takeaways from the article1

  • Less than 24 hours after the two explosions killed three people and injured dozens more at the April 15 Boston Marathon, the FBI had compiled 10 terabytes (TB) of data in hopes of finding needles in haystacks of information that might lead to the suspects.
  • The FBI-led investigation analyzed mountains of cell phone tower call logs, text messages, social media data, photographs and video surveillance footage to quickly pinpoint the suspects.
  • Facial recognition software was being used to compare faces in photographs and video against visa, passport, driver’s license and other databases.
  • While the 10TB of data gathered by investigators seems like a drop in the bucket (the Feds usually work with Petabytes of data), the investigation still presented officials with a large amount of data crunch due to the sheer volume, various types of media and overall complexity of information they were dealing with and requiring a tight window period to analyze.

Dealing with multiple terabytes or more of video, digital images, text message and cell phone records is complex enough as it is. Just imagine how much more of a quagmire is created when you bring social media into the fray? What I found most interesting about this article was that investigators utilized the services of a company called Topsy Labs to sift through billions of tweets. Topsy has stored every tweet generated since July of 2010, and in the case of this terrorist investigation, allowed investigators to run big-data analytics of Boston-related tweets against hundreds of billions of past and present messages. Topsy’s database analytic software allowed investigators to search every reference ever made to Twitter of the word “bomb” in a specific region including Boston and its adjoining suburbs.

Ultimately, this type of detailed search turned up deleted bomb references from both suspects’ Twitter accounts. This type of search through public records likely revealed additional clues that proved detrimental to the investigation, including which users re-tweeted the bomb mentions or engaged in incriminating dialogue with the terrorist suspects. Furthermore, Topsy has “geo-inferencing” technology which allowed the investigators to accurately map where specified tweets originated (pretty cool considering only about 1% of Twitter users geo-tag their tweets). According to Topsy, those capabilities make it 20 times more accurate than standard Twitter location data.

How amazing is that?

Emulex – We ‘get’ big data

At Emulex, we believe the heart of big data at the core, lies within the framework of an organizations’ network. There are thousands of servers performing parallel processing to create value and those servers talk to each other over Ethernet and Fibre Channel protocols. As such, the latency and throughput of the network’s traffic is the critical path for fast results in big data deployments. Emulex solves these latency issues and is the chosen vendor by organizations worldwide because we provide the right I/O solution to maximize data clusters and allow for the seamless deployment of big data solutions. For a more in-depth view on Emulex’s big data expertise please reference my earlier blog here.

It is unfortunate that we live in a world of uncertainty, fear and carnage at the behest of a few loathsome individuals. But it’s also refreshing to remember our community is capable of greatness and benevolence in times of need just as the citizens of Boston demonstrated during and after this terrible incident. Even though the deployment of big data practices were crucial towards the investigation, let’s not forget it was ultimately the tip of a citizen that finally led investigators to the two perpetrators. In the end, no technology, no matter how advanced, can replace the fortitude and good-will of mankind.

¹ FCW, APR, 2013

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Is it time for SSD in the data center? You bet your OPEX!

Posted May 3rd, 2013 by Mike Jochimsen

Recently, we published a slideshow on IT Business Edge titled “Five reasons why HDD is dead and SSD is taking over.”  Provocative?  Sure, but that was the point. Do I really think the hard disk drive (HDD) market is dead?  Not that it matters what I think, but no… EMC, IBM, HP and a huge number of storage vendors continue to sell massive quantities of HDDs every day and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

However, recently it feels like we are rapidly approaching Gladwell’s tipping point where “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do1.” Well, the pandemic that is solid state disk (SSD) sure seems to fit that criteria.  Come on, would IBM bet one BILLION dollars in something that is just a fad?

In the immortal words of Ron Popeil, “but wait, there’s more,” it seems like every analyst on the planet is now talking as if the use of SSD/flash in servers and storage is becoming a de facto standard.

So, what is the use case?  While SSDs began appearing in servers in recent years as local storage, the idea that they could effectively replace storage area networks (SANs) began to fade when users realized that large databases, virtual environments, and big data analytics required lots of servers touching common shared storage.  The use case for this local flash storage morphed into server-based caching, which is how companies such as EMC and Fusion-io are now positioning their PCI Express (PCIe)-based flash adapters. Also in recent years, these SSDs began appearing in the storage fabric in at least three use cases – SSD front-ending traditional spinning disks in a storage enclosure (hybrid arrays), SSDs in a fabric-based appliance front-ending a traditional spinning disk array, and all flash arrays as primary storage.

Most of the large storage vendors already offer hybrid arrays, which offer a flash front-end to spinning disks to accelerate performance.  This offers a relatively easy way to begin experiencing the benefits of SSD.  Although this wasn’t without some angst since the addition of SSD into the array created need for changes to the RAID controllers typically optimized to place data on spinning disks.  While some customers see this as an onboarding opportunity into SSD storage, others may find it is their destination, giving “good enough” performance.

We are beginning to see the adoption of all flash appliances in the market increase as the waves of large databases and increasingly dense virtual environments demand larger data stores with higher I/O operations per second (IOPS) and lower latency.  Offerings include GreenBytes with their IO Offload Engine providing an accelerated virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and Fusion-io’s ION Software Defined Storage, which can either present itself as fabric-based cache or primary storage.  On the extreme end of the scale, companies like PureStorage and Violin Memory provide all flash arrays capable of handling very robust and demanding application environments.

Again, in the immortal words of Clara Peller “Where’s the beef?”

Much of the resistance to bringing SSD into primary storage has been cost.  Generally, HDDs are ten times more cost effective than SSD when measured on a dollar per GB ($/GB) basis (although Steve Mills of IBM claimed the cost differential was less than double in the article mentioned above. Since SSD costs continue to fall, assume the real answer lies somewhere between 2X and 10X.)  However, SSDs are at least 100 times more cost-effective than HDDs on a dollar per IOPS ($/IOPS) basis. Given that increased IOPS is such a central value proposition to SSD storage, it makes sense for SSD array vendors to make this argument.  But it also makes sense in general.  In the HDD world, generations of spinning disk offered modest improvements in performance when compared to the dramatic leap offered by the move from HDD to SSD.  For example, from 7K, to 10K, to 15K, HDD IOPS increased in modest increments, like 30-100%.  However, the difference in IOPS between a 15K drive and an SSD can be in the range of 2000%!

The other major advantages that SSDs bring to the data center are power and cooling efficiency.  An SSD has no moving parts so it requires much less power to run and generates little to no heat, which has a dramatic effect on cooling costs.  In our slide show referenced above, we quote Marc Staimer, founder of Dragon Slayer Consulting, who estimates the power and cooling savings of SSD over HDD can be in the 50-80% range.  I’ve seen similar estimates from other analysts as well, giving the claims of the flash/SSD community some credence.  This becomes a very important factor given the constraints that today’s data centers are facing in power and cooling capacity.  Given the overall economic situation in recent years, there has been a slowdown in data center build out, forcing many companies to optimize the use of their current facilities.  This provides one more arrow in their quiver of optimization strategies.

So, is HDD technology really dead?  Not likely in the near future.  However, with the growing capacity, shrinking cost and efficiency benefits that SSD can bring to the data center, it is quite conceivable that the tipping point HAS been reached and the mix of HDD vs. SSD in the data center will soon start to fall in favor of SSD technology.  Enterprise customers do need the operational expenditure (OPEX) savings and facilities relief that SSD technology can bring to their “shrink IT while maintaining service level agreement (SLA)” directives.

Emulex is right in the middle of this evolution.  Our ever-evolving Fibre Channel and Ethernet I/O connectivity solutions continue to provide the high IOPS and low latency that customers need to keep pace with the abilities of today’s high end servers and storage.  Also, as SSDs, flash and cache continue to appear at new points in the I/O path, Emulex is on the leading edge of understanding how to optimize I/O architectures and provide the solutions that will keep pace with the endpoints.

Our world class monitoring solutions, OneCommand Vision and EndaceVision can ensure that the I/O channel is performing optimally and securely.  The combination of these two products gives us this ability across both Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabrics. We continue to evolve these solutions in conjunction with our ecosystem partners to ensure that as databases, hypervisors, big data analytics and cloud computing evolve with technologies such as SSD and flash memory, we can continue to ensure this optimal performance.

If you are planning to attend Interop May 7th through 9th in Las Vegas, stop by the Emulex booth #1759 and hear more about what we are doing (or read this blog on what we’re highlighting!).

  1. Malcolm Gladwell “The Tipping Point”, 2000, Little Brown

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Emulex @Interop 2013 – partners, demos…and a sweet giveaway

Posted May 2nd, 2013 by John Cedillo

Interop 2013 is upon us and with that, we are excited to officially unveil our new Endace portfolio, which is a key component to our new ‘Connect, Monitor, Manage’ vision for the data center. Now, not only does Emulex provide the highest performance storage and network connectivity products available on in the market, along with industry-leading and seamless management tools, but we now provide the unique ability to provide 100% accurate, high-speed intelligent network recording.

In addition to highlighting our broadened product portfolio, we have a jam-packed booth full of partner ‘pods’ and demonstrations, more than 30 booth theater presentations with partners like Dell, EMC, Fusion-IO and HP, and our biggest giveaway yet of 2013 – a brand new Honda CBR500R road bike! You’ll have plenty of ways to enter to win this awesome prize, by attending one of our booth theater presentations, and weighing in on what you liked most from those presentations and demonstrations, on our Facebook or Twitter pages.

Here is a snapshot of the sessions you’ll hear at the booth theater, every 30 minutes Tuesday-Thursday of the show (go to our buzz site to see the schedule, access collateral and more!):

  • Prepare for the Inevitable – The Power of Intelligent Network Recording
  • Emulex OneConnect Network Xceleration Solutions – FastStack VideoPump
  • EMC Flash Deployments in Today’s Data Center, Avishek Kumar, Product Management, EMC
  • HP Virtual Connect: Wire-Once, Change-Ready, Kant Deshpande, WW Product Manager, Virtual Connect, HP
  • LAN & SAN Convergence with Dell Networking S5000, Saleem Muhammad, Product Management, Dell Data Center Networking
  • Trends and Advancements in 10G NAS, Chris Wang, Product Marketing Manager, QNAP
  • Emulex & Fusion-io: More Data Faster, Jonathan Flynn, Manager Data Propulsion Labs, Fusion-io

So stop by and visit us at booth #1759 any time during the show to hear one of several booth theater presentations, learn how Emulex is uniquely positioned to help you Connect, Monitor, and Manage your resources, and check out our live InteropNet demonstration where we will show how organizations can diagnose and troubleshoot network, application and security issues using EndaceVisionTM – the world’s only browser-based network traffic search engine.

We look forward to seeing you at the show next week!

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Emulex 16GFC HBAs deliver up to 10 times better reliability to keep systems up and running

Posted May 1st, 2013 by Barbara Porter

A detailed reliability study by Emulex Labs shows that based on component selection, the Emulex 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapter (HBA) can deliver up to 10x better reliability than QLogic’s newly released QLE2600 series. The LPe16000B was designed with reliability in mind, with a cool running ASIC and fail-proof passive heat sink for heat management within the server.

Emulex leads in reliability with the highest published mean time between failure (MTBF) in the HBA industry—10 million hours MTBF on the LightPulse family of 2G, 4G, 8G and 16GFC HBAs. For more information on why OEMs have deployed more Emulex LPe16000-series HBAs than any other 16GFC HBA, click here.

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Are the causes of pesky and serious application performance issues still a big unknown? Stop guessing today and lower time to resolution of I/O issues

Posted April 26th, 2013 by Erick Crowell

It’s more common than you might think. A critical system (say, your ordering system) is exhibiting intermittent slowdowns and users are complaining. There are certainly a lot of teams searching for the solution but the intermittent nature of the problem makes it difficult for any team to provide proof that their component is (or is not) at fault.

OneCommand Vision Free EditionIn these situations, we see lots of finger pointing, data collection, and waiting around for problems to reproduce. Vendors and IT staff huddled around conference calls, consuming countless hours of productivity, delaying important projects from completing and affecting business agility. The business must wait for the, often slow, process of trial and error issue discovery to unfold; revealing small clues to what could be the source of slowdowns and outages.

These types of pesky and serious application slowdowns have an instant impact on your bottom line, but they don’t have to. Administrators are often missing the information they need to quickly diagnose the source of application performance problems. Many organizations are still using traditional silo based management tools to construct a partial view of performance that can create I/O blind spots that obscure problems and delay resolution.

What’s needed is a shift in perspective provided by application I/O management solutions like OneCommand Vision, that can lower time to resolution (TTR), saving valuable dollars, and freeing up valuable human capital to focus on revenue-generating activities.

How OneCommand Vision can lower the TTR of application performance issues:

  • Provides the “application view” of I/O performance trends, I/O availability and protocol errors impacting applications
  • I/O Expert automated slow-down detection process pinpoints the most likely cause of any I/O slowdown
  • Quickly validates performance impacts/improvements based on configuration changes

Simply put, install Emulex OneCommand® Vision, and within five minutes, you will know:

  1. If the issue is caused by application I/O
  2. If so, the most likely bottleneck within your I/O infrastructure
  3. Which infrastructure devices, including servers, have been affected, letting data center staff focus resources in the right area

In some cases, we helped administrators solve issues that have lingered for 6 months … in a matter of hours. We think that’s pretty powerful, and the customers that have use it agree. Sound interesting? Please try our OneCommand® Vision FREE Edition software for yourself and see the power of perspective.

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The New World of Storage Area Networks: Visa Black Card and Albert Einstein’s Pre-frontal Cortex no longer required

Posted April 24th, 2013 by Sonny Singh

When Storage Area Networks (SANs) first started making a dent in IT data centers back in the early to mid-90’s, a corporation might as well have sold all their employees’ kidneys on the black market in order to swallow the astronomical costs associated with the implantation of a SAN. The other problem was the sheer complexity of SAN topologies. It wouldn’t have been a far stretch for the scientists at NASA having an easier time deploying a biosphere on Mars for humans to inhabit (in the next year) than deploying a SAN.

The tradeoff was that SANs promised (and delivered) a dedicated network that afforded access to consolidated, high-speed networks providing block level data storage. Another crucial business benefit was that long-term deployment costs would diminish because SANs allowed for the sharing of storage pools and offered simplified storage administration with added flexibility since traditional cables and cumbersome storage devices no longer had to be physically moved to shift storage from one server to another.

SANs were and are still primarily used to make storage devices, such as disk arrays, tape libraries, and optical jukeboxes, accessible to servers so that the devices appear like locally attached devices to the operating system (OS). A SAN typically has its own network of storage devices that are generally not accessible through the Local Area Network (LAN) by other devices. Thus, it was no surprise that the so-called “experts” believed Direct Access Storage (DAS) and LANs, at least in theory, would follow the same dismal fate as other archaic technologies because SANs would render them obsolete.

Well, that wasn’t exactly the case (just ask the guys making a killing on their prolific Network Attached Storage (NAS) and DAS solutions). The good news was that the overall cost and complexity of SANs dropped dramatically in the early 2000s to levels allowing wider adoption across both enterprise and small-to-medium sized business environments. Furthermore, SANs have become far easier to manage and deploy, thanks to seamless interoperability practices and the economies of scale generated by the growing number of installations worldwide.

Introducing the new Cisco MDS 9710 & 9250i Storage Directors

In keeping with the spirit of raising the bar for SANs, Cisco recently announced its next-generation SAN solutions supporting their Unified Data Center strategy to help customers merge networking, compute, and storage functions into one data center “fabric” for more efficient IT and business operations. The new Cisco MDS products allow customers to transform business operations with virtualized and cloud-based architectures that reduce expenses, operate more efficiently, provide better and faster business metrics, and offer new business services for corporate growth.

MDS 9710 Storage Director

  • 24 Tbps switching and 1.536 Tbps per slot capacity for Fibre Channel
  • N+1 fabric, fully redundant components and fault-tolerant architectural design
  • Provides a single platform for both high-density Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet while protecting customer investments
  • Supports multi-protocol environments and enables consistent SAN and LAN networking operations

MDS 9250i Fabric Switch

  • Improves efficiency by performing important storage services in the SAN fabric
  • Hosts services for easier SAN management, including Cisco I/O accelerator and Data Mobility Manager
  • Reduces time and resources required to perform common storage management functions
  • Simplifies and accelerates data protection for regulatory compliance

Emulex LightPulse 16Gb Fibre Channel Adapters – Maximizing Cisco MDS Storage Director Deployments

Emulex is a long-standing Cisco technology collaborator and we’re pleased to be a part of and to support the launch of the newest Cisco MDS Storage Director and Fabric Switch with Emulex’s industry-leading LighPulse 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapter (HBA) technology. The LPe16000 16GFC HBA is the clear choice for the toughest virtualized, cloud and mission critical deployments utilizing Cisco MDS storage directors. The Emulex LightPulse 16GFC HBA features the Emulex bullet-proof driver-stack, backward compatibility to 4GFC and 8GFC HBAs and rock-solid reliability with a heritage that spans back to the first generation of Fibre Channel to today’s 16GFC HBAs.

The Emulex LightPulse 16GFC HBA ‘s advanced management functionality can shave days off installing and managing adapters and complements the MDS 9250i Fabric Switch’s host service capabilities for easier SAN management, including Cisco I/O Accelerator and Data Mobility Manager, which improve SAN efficiency by performing important storage services centrally in the fabric; reducing the time and resources required to perform common storage management functions; and simplifying and accelerating data protection for regulatory compliance.

Go ahead…keep your kidneys

It’s safe to say that traditional SAN technology will continue to be viewed as the de-facto storage protocol to meet storage growth needs for the foreseeable future. But don’t get me wrong, if SANs were easy to deploy and cheap to procure, everyone would be doing it, right? Remember, the costs associated with provisioning, scaling and managing SANs has grown quickly as well, creating an even bigger problem for data center managers struggling to meet growth needs with constrained budgets.

The good news is by appropriating a SAN strategy encompassing Cisco’s new MDS 9710 and 9250i Directors, coupled with Emulex LightPulse 16GFC HBA ‘s, you can manage your data center seamlessly and employ a SAN strategy that’s less painful, more cost effective and doesn’t require your employees to sell their kidneys (or other vital organs for that matter) on the black market.

For more information, check out Cisco’s press release here!

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Sarbanes Oxley (SOX): Martha Stewart’s Inspiration for Prison-Inspired Decorative License Plates

Posted April 22nd, 2013 by Sonny Singh

What is it about white collar criminals that makes my blood boil? Maybe it’s some perverse notion in my mind that “real criminals” have some semblance of street cred and the latter are basically corrupt inside traders taking an “extended vacation” in a country club… er, I mean federal institution of the penal kind.

You might fondly recall when Martha Stewart (America’s queen of cliché K-Mart furnishings and interior paint lines) got popped for securities fraud after she avoided a loss of $45,673 by selling all 3,928 shares of her ImClone Systems stock in 2001? Yes, she was subsequently found guilty in March 2004 of conspiracy, obstruction of an agency proceeding, and making false statements to federal investigators. When all things were said and done, she was sentenced in July 2004 to serve a paltry five-months in a federal correctional facility and a two-year period of supervised release that included an electronic bracelet, which I’m surprised she didn’t turn into a jewelry line.

Martha was labeled “M. Diddy” by fellow inmates because of the absolute fear she invoked amongst even the most hardened criminals. No one dared cross her as she perfected her moonshine peach lemonade and equally gangster lemon soufflé. When she did end up finishing her hard-time, she merrily returned to her Martha Stewart Living Empire and subjugates us to Martha Stewart branded vitamin supplements, maternity clothing and convection ovens. Justice would have been much better served had she toiled in the prison yard donning her artisan skills on handmade license plates.

Now in all fairness to M-Diddy, she seems like Mother Theresa when compared to one of the most prolific white collar criminals to date, Tyco’s former chief executive, L. Dennis Kozlowski, who systematically created a corporate culture of greed and excess, secretly authorizing the forgiveness of tens of millions of dollars of loans to dozens of executives to keep their loyalty¹. It gets better. At Mr. Kozlowski’s direction and without board approval, 51 Tyco employees received $56 million in bonuses — and $39 million more to pay the taxes on the bonuses — that offset loans extended by the company.

Kozlowski spent tens of millions of dollars in personal spending with company money including his $16.8 million apartment on Fifth Avenue — along with $3 million in renovations and $11 million in furnishings — and a $7 million apartment on Park Avenue for his former wife. Some of the items below would even make Martha Stewart envious:

  • $80,000 American Express bill
  • $72,000 fee to Germán Frers, a yacht maker;
  • $17,100 traveling toilet box (um…what is a traveling toilet box?)
  • $15,000 dog umbrella stand (Cat umbrella stands come in at only $7,000)
  • $6,300 sewing basket
  • $6,000 shower curtain
  • $5,960 for two sets of sheets
  • $2,900 set of coat hangers
  • $2,200 gilt metal wastebasket
  • $1,650 notebook
  • $445 pincushion (How is that even possible?!)

In the end, some semblance of justice prevailed when Kowalski and other nefarious individuals at Tyco received extensive sentencing (Mr. K getting a maximum of 25 years himself).

Watch out white collar criminals, there’s a new sheriff in town!

It was only a matter of time before something had to be enacted to curb and dissuade these types of unethical business practices. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was created to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures. The legislation, often referred to as SOX, amends mail and wire fraud infractions with harsher punishments and imposes fines and prison sentences of up to 20 years for anyone who knowingly alters or destroys a record or document with the intent to obstruct an investigation. While most provisions of the act focus on financial records, they were clearly not meant to stop there. For example, during an investigation, discovery requests can be submitted to IT departments. In addition, such requests could require access to all e-mail communication².

The legislation not only affects the financial side of corporations, it also affects the IT departments whose job it is to store a corporation’s electronic records. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act states that all business records, including electronic records and electronic messages, must be saved for “not less than five years.” The consequences for non-compliance are fines, imprisonment, or both. IT departments are increasingly faced with the challenge of creating and maintaining a corporate records archive in a cost-effective fashion that satisfies the requirements put forth by the legislation².

Quick data retrieval is another requirement under Sarbanes-Oxley, which makes perfect sense. In the event a company is subpoenaed, the last thing a corporate legal team wants to do is wait a week for their IT department to pull the right records, which is a detriment to crafting their defense.

Emulex and Quantum – Helping CEOs stay out of prison (legally of course)

Partners and appliance integrators continue to certify and adopt Emulex 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) because we offer the best performing HBA available today, enabling the most compelling application throughput and I/O scalability³. In addition, our superior reliability and extensive interoperability testing allows for seamless deployment across multiple platforms.

Emulex recently announced broad partner adoption of its LightPulse® 16GFC HBAs worldwide. Emulex 16GFC HBAs are the most widely deployed 16GFC HBAs by OEMs, with more than 70 percent of the overall revenue market share for 20124. Quantum, a global expert in data protection and big data management solutions, specifically certified Emulex 16GFC HBAs with their solutions in order to achieve the most scalable solutions for its data archiving and backup solutions. Chiefly, a key requirement was addressing the strict data retrieval access times specified by SOX.

Quantum wanted to take advantage of the Emulex 16GFC adapter’s superior performance and low latency benefits required for their data recovery solutions. In particular, The Quantum LTO6 drives within the Quantum Scalar i500 and i6000 libraries leverage Emulex 16GFC HBAs to deliver increased bandwidth for improved backup and recovery performance. This is important, as applications drive increased storage growth, resulting in the need for robust and rapid backup to minimize both data loss downtime and most importantly, recovery times.

Make no mistake about it, SOX can bite a corporation in the caboose if they aren’t prepared for an audit and that’s why they require a cost-effective, reliable and easy-to-manage solution with options to scale from terabytes up to many petabytes. When coupled with Emulex 16GFC HBAs, Quantum Scalar libraries deliver improved backup and recovery performance to address SOX requirements, now and in the future.

Unfortunately, I am certain we will continue to see unethical business practices that deem the wrath of SOX in the future (e.g. Bernie Madoff). However, for every white collar criminal there are a million white collar good-guys trying to do the right thing. How about starting with Emulex 16GFC adapters? It the surest way to avoid having to knit dog sweaters with Martha Stewart in prison.

1. The New York Times, 2002

2. TechRepublic: Sarbanes Oxley Compliance Regulatory Review, August 2005

3.  Demartek: Emulex LPe16000B 16 Gb Fibre Channel HBA Feature Comparison, December 2012

4.  Dell’Oro Group: Fibre Channel Adapter Vendor Report 4Q12, February 2013

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What is the value of a partnership in the technology industry or what I learned while sitting on a jury

Posted April 1st, 2013 by Mike Jochimsen

Partner: One associated with another, especially in an action. One of two or more persons who play together in a game against an opposing side.(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/partner)

I spent the past week on a jury in a felony, first degree burglary trial (yeah, I’ve already been chastised by everyone I know for my inability to get released from jury duty). I’m two for two in my last two attempts – meaning I’ve sat on juries two times in a row. My excuse is that I am just too honest.

I had a lot of time (I mean a LOT of time) to sit and reflect during this week. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of fulfilling their civic duty by showing up for jury service, may I simply say your time will come – at least I hope it does, so they quit calling me EXACTLY every 18 months.

Silhouettes of PeopleDuring these great reflective periods I learned a few things. I learned that while I am sure there are great reasons, the use of a juror’s time seems extremely inefficient, giving them long periods of time to reflect. More importantly, by observing the trial process, I learned two important lessons that apply directly to my job, and yours if you are reading this:

  1. It takes partnerships to prove or disprove charges, assertions and accusations
  2. Every charge, assertion or accusation is false until proven beyond a reasonable doubt

Partnership – In the courtroom it means using all of the resources at your disposal to prove guilt or in defense of your client. In this case, the district attorney used the arresting officer and the crime lab technician to prove his case – he partnered with them to offer compelling evidence. The idea of establishing a partnership in the information technology industry is driven from the fact that very few companies truly provide all of the components of a “solution.” For example, the act of building a reference architecture for a “simple” Oracle database environment can encompasses at least six discrete technologies from different vendors, for example:

  • Server – HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8
  • Storage – EMC Symmetrix VMAX 10K
  • I/O – Emulex LightPulse LPe12002 Host Bus Adapters (HBAs)
  • Switch – Brocade 6250 switch
  • Operating System – Windows Server 2012, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, Oracle Linux 6.4
  • Database – Oracle Database 11g Release 2

Now, with various OEM deals, a customer can usually buy many of these components from a single vendor. However, I purposely outlined an architecture above that cannot be purchased from a single vendor to prove a point that the data center remains a “mix and match” environment. This puts the burden on the customer or channel to integrate. To attempt to make the customer’s life easier, vendors such as Emulex create reference architectures or blueprints to show these customers best practices they can use to implement in their environment.

I look around my house at all of the technology we use and I can’t see this same problem existing here. I buy a refrigerator from Sears, and as far as I know, it is all Kenmore. I don’t care that Sears bought fans, cooling units, shelving and other components from different vendors. The end result is a self-contained unit and when I have problems, I call Sears for support.

The IT industry has attempted to solve the above problem by returning to its roots. Oracle with its Exa- machines didn’t invent appliances, but they were on the leading edge of the trend towards resurrecting the mainframe computing concept, which is a monolithic computing stack with every component from a single vendor. However, the recent incarnation of computing appliances is still generally a grouping of different vendor components in a single chassis. While the assembling vendor may offer first level support for all components, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more complex issues end up with the support staff of the component vendor. This stuff is just too complex.

Which brings me full circle to the value of partnering. We, as technology vendors, have a responsibility to our customers to attempt to drive the complexity out of the solutions we are asking you to buy. In other words, we need to prove our assertions or disprove our competitors’ accusations. We do that in many ways. As I mentioned above, creating reference architectures or blueprints is one. At Emulex, we have something called the Implementer’s Lab. We have a small group of very intelligent engineers who work with all of the components of a solution in our lab and then document their experience. Some people call these best practices, or cookbooks. We call them Deployment Guides, Solution Guides and Application Notes.

We can’t do this in a vacuum. Well, we could, but the result might not be optimal for you. We are attempting to reduce the complexity of these installations for you by collaborating with the server, storage, switching, operating system (OS)/virtualization and application vendors to implement a solution in the best possible way and then document it for you. You won’t see a lot of marketing in these guides, but you will get a lot of practical advice and guidelines.

Some of my favorites include Alex Amaya’s “ VMware vSphere 5.1: 16Gb Fibre Channel SANs with HP ProLiant DL380 Gen8 servers and HP 3PAR Storage” and a paper we did with James Morle at Scale Abilities titled “Deploying 8Gb Fibre Channel with Oracle Database.” No hype, “just the facts, ma’am.”

I was extremely impressed when the district attorney repeatedly reminded us that we needed to hold him to a very high standard of proof. We had taken an oath to hold him to this standard of proving the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It was brought home to me when, during his closing arguments, the district attorney stated very emphatically that he had provided us with overwhelming evidence that proved the guilt of the defendant. However, if we did not believe his witnesses or evidence we were bound by law to rule “not guilty.” He ended by very confidently stating that he believed we would not do so after simply looking at the facts.

We voted unanimously to convict.

And so I ask you ladies and gentlemen, storage administrators, systems administrators, network administrators, help desk technicians, directors of IT, VPs of IT and CIOs, hold us to that same high standard. If you don’t believe the evidence we provide you by all means don’t buy our stuff. However, I am confident that when you look at the facts you will see that the evidence is overwhelming and we have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Emulex has great technology and our work with the ecosystem of partners provides you the details you need to confidently deploy these solutions in your environment.

I rest my case.

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Three essential elements of an effective application I/O management solution

Posted March 28th, 2013 by Erick Crowell

Conventional performance management tools ignore I/O blind spots, slowing the resolution of application availability and performance issues by days and often failing to provide advance warning of application slowdowns. Worse, each incremental layer of virtualization adds I/O contention points. To ensure your application I/O is performing at its peak, the following three essential elements are required of your I/O management solution:

  • Measure I/O performance and availability from the application’s point of view
  • End-to end, cross-domain, multi-path visibility from the application layer
  • Expert analytics to quickly detect and root cause the source of any I/O slowdowns
Application View

Measuring I/O performance from the application’s perspective is critical, as seemingly insignificant downstream slowdowns can have a 5-20X multiplier effect on application slowdowns. An end-to-end “application view” of I/O performance and path availability provides insight into all the layers (and paths) between an application and its storage and captures delays throughout the entire path, including virtual/physical servers, network and storage arrays (from all vendors).

This unique perspective exposes I/O blind spots, providing insight often missed by other management tools already in the IT toolbox. I/O management solutions that provide leading edge end-to-end application view of I/O enable organizations to:

  • Automate I/O performance monitoring
  • Dramatically reduce application downtime
  • Proactively report when application I/O expectations are violated
  • Lower time to resolution on hard to solve infrastructure issues

Monitor All Block I/O

Business applications often depend on I/O devices both inside the server and available on the storage area network (SAN). As more applications make the jump to virtual environments, more and more I/O devices are also virtualized.

Leading I/O management solutions provide the most comprehensive perspective, providing a single tool for complete visibility into I/O provided by SAN-attached devices (Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet [FCoE], iSCSI) as well as I/O delivered by devices within servers themselves, including flash (solid state disk [SSD]) block cache, direct attached storage (DAS), software RAID and logical (virtual) volumes.

Analytics and Automation

With thousands of I/O paths between servers and storage, administrators cannot manage I/O performance using data alone. The ideal application I/O performance management tools will simplify I/O management processes and deliver industry leading I/O Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Intelligent Alerts that help enforce the Service, Performance, Availability, and capacity of critical storage resources.

OneCommand® Vision

OneCommand Vision delivers the three essential elements of an effective application I/O management solution. It proactively monitors I/O from the application’s perspective, delivering a non-invasive, easy to use software-based approach that is unique among I/O management solutions. By providing a consistent application view of all block I/O devices inside the server and over the network, OneCommand Vision provides a comprehensive and proactive I/O performance and availability management for physical and virtualization deployments.

OneCommand Vision Performance @ Availability SLAs encapsulate the specific needs of each application and can be defined using the historical I/O performance captured by the tool itself.

In addition, the embedded analytics and correlation engine (ACE) helps identify I/O blind spots and pinpoint troublesome infrastructure devices that may be preventing applications from achieving high levels of I/O performance and availability.

Interested in checking it out? Contact us for a 20 minute sales-free demo or download OneCommand Vision FREE edition and see in just minutes how application I/O management can make a difference in your data center today.

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Sorry Mr. Competitor – Your Kung Fu Is No Good Here

Posted March 15th, 2013 by Sonny Singh

I am about to make a bold statement right now that will likely get me in me more hot water than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “cheek-to-cheek” performance at the funeral of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez this week (if you have no idea what I am talking about, go on TMZ.com). So here it goes: I am utterly confident the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA) will surpass boxing and may even usurp established national icons, such as baseball and football in the foreseeable future based on MMA’s staggering growth predictions alone. At a bare minimum, MMA will steamroll over figure-skating and cardboard tube dueling (Yes, this is a real sport: http://www.tubeduel.com/) by 2014.

MMA is projected to grow into a multi-billion dollar industry within a few years and is considered the fastest growing sport in the world. To give you an idea of its growth potential, MMA recently went mainstream when the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) organization “officially” evolved from the lunatic fringe of the sports world to a Fox TV rights deal, reportedly worth $100 million annually for seven years¹. The growth of MMA is commendable, and its established rules and regulations have shattered the idiosyncratic and anachronistic notions of a certain senator who once compared the sport to “human cockfighting.”

I’ll never forget when I witnessed Brazilian Royce Gracie use his unprecedented jiu-jitsu skills to famously decimate fighter after fighter who weren’t schooled in grappling and submission fighting in the early 90’s. Gracie fought against often much larger opponents who were practicing established martial arts including boxing, kung-fu, karate, judo and tae kwon do. He unequivocally demonstrated to the world of combat sports that it was indeed possible to beat opponents who were much larger, stronger and muscular than the average person. It was then and there I realized the importance of constantly evolving to be the best in any given arena.

Until that point, my adulation of the “Ultimate Fighter” consisted of one Ralph Macchio painstakingly deploying endless hours of wax-on, wax-off on Mr. Miyagi’s 1950 canary yellow Chevy convertible. Don’t get me wrong, Daniel-San’s flawless execution of that infamous Crane kick on Johnny’s poor head at that cinematic finale still sends shivers down my spine. But here’s the cold hard truth; Had Ralph Macchio used that flash-dance inspired crane kick on Royce Gracie back at UFC 1, he would have had the silly headband he wore on his forehead, instead wrapped around his neck and used to choke him out.

In the end, the true appeal of MMA comes down to its forceful evolution of prior one-dimensional martial arts into a multi-faceted, multi-disciplined combat sport that constantly demands its athletes equally evolve or be left in the dirt like a discarded Karate Kid 3 VHS tape. There is a reason why the elite fighters in MMA are considered the crème-de-la-crème of athletes in the world bar-none. I am vehement in my conviction that you won’t find a better specimen that embodies the rare blend of unrivaled athleticism, strength, agility, intellect and uncanny propensity for formulating and executing intricate game plans like you would in MMA.

The same comparison can be made for the ever-evolving, ever-changing and ever-converging world of technology. High-tech companies offering goods and services that are deemed a one-trick pony and fail to stay competitive, will also find themselves in the same category as B-movie actors like Jean-Claude-Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren with their straight-to –DVD films (with the exception of the Expendables 2 which deserved an academy award). Emulex is the MMA athlete of the tech world for the simple reason that our hardware and software solutions push the envelope for innovation, scalability and performance. Just ask our competitors (who won’t be named). Continue reading…

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