Why I/O is Strategic is a new education campaign that Emulex has kicked off (see our press release here) with leading industry analysts, including Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), IDC, Evaluator Group and 451 Research, to demonstrate the strategic importance of I/O in the data center for four key trends: virtualization, cloud computing, big data and convergence. We wanted to do something different with this series than the typical vendor model of saying…here is a problem; here are a few options to solving the problem and look ours is the best… As marketing people, we obviously get paid to say our stuff is good, but we wanted to take a new approach to this educational effort by creating a virtual panel of experts to bring a wider perspective to IT managers. The new education series, which is based on a survey of 1500 IT managers, a series of briefs by industry analysts, followed up with a series of associated webcasts, helps IT professionals build better strategic I/O plans for these emerging trends in the market. Here are some of the questions we will tackle in the briefs and the webcasts:
- Virtualization
- How will you support up to 100 virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical server?
- What are the right virtual Network Interface Card (NIC) and switch plans?
- How will the purchase of software-defined networking (SDN)/Nicera change the deployment of networks on virtual servers?
- How do you manage I/O for 1000 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) clients?
- Cloud
- What is the right I/O strategy for deploying your private cloud?
- What I/O model should your public cloud provider have going forward?
- How will Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE) and Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) change the mobility and scalability of applications?
- Big Data
- Can I/O make Hadoop run faster?
- What is the best I/O for all that east-west traffic?
- How do I use NoSQL in these environments?
- Convergence
- Can I run HPC workloads on this to skip going to InfiniBand?
- What is RDMA and why do I care?
- Fibre Channel (FC) or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) what should I use for my next storage network?
- What are the best practices for moving to 10Gb network convergence?
- When is 40Gb Ethernet (40GbE) hitting the market?
One of the best parts of our business is that it never stops moving forward and innovation is constant. Sometimes it comes from leaps in technology, leaps in commoditization, leaps in business models, leaps in processes, but whatever the leap is based on, it requires the vendors, analysts and IT professionals to never stop learning.
Our plan is to tackle 3-4 new trends each quarter over the next year to keep the dialog going. I hope you can make the time to read the anthology briefs created by our virtual panel of industry analysts and attend the webcasts with each industry analyst and industry partners. I can’t tell you everything that will happen, but I can tell you that knowing “Why I/O is Strategic?” actually is strategic to you, your business and your career. The new information in this education series will help you be better at your job and smarter than the guy in the next cube and that will make you more strategic to your company.
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