Emulex Blog: Market Mantras

Sweet 16Gb: Long Live Fibre Channel

Posted October 30th, 2009 by Shaun Walsh

Screen shot 2009-10-30 at 9.20.55 AMWith all the talk about network convergence this week, you might be thinking that we have forgotten about Fibre Channel. No way! This month, the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) ratified the 16Gb Fibre Channel standard, and this week, we announced the industry’s first 16Gb design win with our long-time partner, IBM p Series.

Fibre Channel Market Muscle

According to the Dell Oro Group, Fibre Channel will be a $675 million market by 2013, so it is not going anywhere. Why? Installed base and investment protection is a key factor, but it goes beyond that. Fibre Channel is one of the proven cornerstones of the data center, and IT managers will not just abandon a proven solution. Fibre Channel will be a dominant storage interconnect as a standalone transport or encapsulated in FCoE for at least another decade.

The Powers of 2

1, 2, 4, 8 and now 16Gb. Fibre Channel continues to move forward, and yes, 32Gb is on the FCIA roadmap as well. Each generation of Fibre Channel has followed a power of 2 and shows no sign of stopping. Here are some details from the press release: ”The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) ANSI INCITS T11 committee completed the technical work on the FC-PI-5 for 16Gb/s Fibre Channel (“16GFC”) and voted in early October to send the document out for letter ballot. This milestone marks the technical stability and completeness necessary for vendors to commit to silicon their upcoming designs based upon the FC-PI-5 standard…” This is exactly what IBM and Emulex have done with our announcement this week.

As you would expect, 16Gb Fibre Channel users will experience twice the bandwidth of 8Gb Fibre Channel, and like previous generations of Fibre Channel, 16Gb Fibre Channel will auto-negotiate backward compatibly to 8Gb Fibre Channel and 4Gb Fibre Channel. 16Gb Fibre Channel provides a natural migration path from 8/4Gb Fibre Channel and ensures the end-user full confidence that 8Gb Fibre Channel purchases made today are preserved investments for tomorrow.

16Gb Fibre Channel will provide more virtual ports to improved efficiencies with high-density multi-core CPUs, improve single-root hypervisors support, improve IOPS for solid state disk drives and make way for third-generation PCI Express (PCIe) bus architectures and shared I/O deployments. Additional information on the standardization efforts of 16Gb Fibre Channel is available at the ANSI T11 Web site: www.t11.org.

How Do We Reconcile Support for Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet via Network Convergence?

Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) are complementary, not competitive. Fibre Channel is a core part of network convergence. By supporting the latest innovations in Fibre Channel, we are enabling network convergence and advancing tools that will help us build better, more flexible and more powerful FCoE implementations for 10GbE and 40GbE in the future.

Yes, Emulex is a strong advocate of network convergence. We see network convergence and FCoE as a market expansion opportunity, not a market replacement. We started this blog by saying Fibre Channel will be a big market for many years to come, and we plan to keep growing in our core Fibre Channel markets.

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The VAR View – Cash for Convergence: Merging IP and Fibre Channel for Fun and Profit

Posted August 10th, 2009 by Shaun Walsh

Welcome to the first entry in “The VAR View” series. As part of the Market Mantras Blog, we will begin a series of blog entries about how value-added resellers (VARs) can grow their business and profits with network convergence. This series will be dedicated to helping our partners get ready for the network convergence market and outline ways to merge IP and Fibre Channel for fun and profit. At the end of this blog, I have provided a sampling of titles for forthcoming blogs in this series.

Recently, the U.S. Congress allocated another $2 billion dollars for the “Cash for Clunkers” program and, since I love catch phases—typical marketing vice—I thought to myself, “Cash for Convergence”…what would that program look like? Let’s face it, market transitions are the best source of cash for the VAR community. That’s because, in the early phases of a market transition, it is VARs who invest and develop domain expertise and best practices. This provides the opportunity to build a profitable new practice: selling more consulting while developing sustainable professional services.

When I think about network convergence, I am reminded of the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) transition. We had IP VARs on the right and telecom VARs on the left. For the most part, they were separate markets that did not overlap. VoIP brought these two markets together and created an entirely new class of VAR. VoIP VARs needed to know more than just the technical aspects of IP and telecom. They had to learn about selling IP-based telecom versus traditional phone systems; build new value positioning; overcome the technology adoption concerns; document the tangible return on investment (ROI) of the new VoIP solution; and call on new types of people in their accounts and understand the incredibly complex world of telecom billing services. In short, they worked hard for their money, but they created new value in their businesses with a differentiated, sustainable and profitable stream of hardware, software and services revenue.

I see the same opportunity for our VAR partners when I look at the network convergence market. This is not about replacing Fibre Channel pipes with 10GbE IP pipes. It is about building a business practice that is much more than merging networks to save on hardware. It will require a VAR to completely understand network management, security, business continuance, regulatory policies and many more items that are involved in the merged world of IP and Fibre Channel. As Billy Mays would say, “But that’s not all!”.The most challenging part will be the human factors. In the converged world, who owns the network now? Is it the applications administrator, because of virtualization? Is it the storage administrator because of the unique storage skills required? Or is it the networking administrator, because it is all based on 10GbE IP going forward? Or is it the security administrator? Also, who sets the policies for each part of the network? What are the best practices in the converged world? The list goes on and on.

When I look at the network convergence market opportunity, I see four key areas for VARs to add value:

  • General Contractor – We have to merge the current network plumbing into the converged world without breaking the current infrastructure and provide a path forward based on the upgraded network convergence architecture.
  • Group Therapist – Network convergence will force the administrative staff in many companies to go through the five phases of mourning before they reach acceptance of the new networking model. Sitting down with the various administrative staff to get them comfortable and accepting of the new networking model will probably be the most challenging part of the new business practice. They will need to be educated about providing the right tools, diagnostics and spheres of influence.
  • Purveyor of Best Practices – When you have the administrative staff buy-in, then you have to provide the right policies, configuration settings and best practices to support service level agreements (SLAs), security, regulatory, business continuance and other operational rules of the road in the new network convergence model.
  • Consigliore – As in “The Godfather,” every IT don needs a trusted consigliere to provide ongoing support, new equipment, services and support.

Building a new practice in network convergence will require some work, but the rewards should be a sustainable and profitable practice for our VAR partners across the globe. In future blog entries we will explore each of these topics in detail.

Additional Blog Topics for “The VAR View”:

  • Steps to Building a Network Convergence Practice
  • Shrinking the Admins – How to get “Group Think” about Network Convergence Administration
  • Getting your Network Convergence General Contractors License
  • Becoming the Professor of Professional Services in a Converged World
  • Building the new Network Convergence Rack: What you need to Know
  • Selling Network Convergence to the CIO…What He or She Needs to Know
  • Best Practices for Converged Networking Management
    • IP, iSCSI, FCoE
    • Provisioning
    • VM configuration and support

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Big Brother Speaks and Says Emulex Is Right About FCoE

Posted August 4th, 2009 by Shaun Walsh

In May, IDC released their 2009 Storage Networking Infrastructure 2009-2013 Forecast – Server Slow Down Stifles FC HBAs and Switch Sales, while Laying the Ground Work for FCoE and 10GbE. That title is quite a mouthful, but I think we can eat this elephant one bite at a time and find some interesting directional vectors from this report. As a marketing professional, I love data from analysts that can help validate our fundamental suppositions of the market and can be used to create collateral, press, sales tools and positioning that says both that “we were right” and “our strategy is the right one.” After all, that is what marketing people get paid to do. We are supposed to anticipate where the market is going and help guide our customers, companies and partners to continued growth and opportunity. No, we don’t always get it right, but when it comes to network convergence with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) over 10Gb/s Enhanced Ethernet, Emulex is no doubt very close to on-target.

Here are a few of my favorite tidbits from our friends at IDC:

IDC Quote

Emulex Thoughts

“Finally, the end of 2008 saw the first tangible steps toward the introduction of FCoE, a new technology for easing network consolidation in datacenters. These steps included finalizing the FCoE standard, announcements of the first FCoE CNAs, 10GE switches with FCoE support, and the first FCoE-attached arrays.”*

As the saying goes, “it takes a village”-or, in the IT industry, an ecosystem to support a major technology transition. The support is there from every key OEM and alliance vendor Emulex works with. Now we need to get the channels ready.

“It is also critical that FC infrastructure suppliers begin to rethink direct sales, channel sales, and services strategies as they develop their next-generation storage interconnect solutions.”*

Emulex is working with our OEM, channel and alliance partners to build new programs and solutions. We are prepared with all of the essential tools, such as our Convergenomics™ The Guide to Network Convergence Solutions, which we first delivered in April, for building a new breed of convergence networking VARs that bring IP networking and storage networking into a single domain.

” Over the next five years, the critical challenges for storage interconnect suppliers will be to establish market leadership positions in the emerging markets for FCoE and 10GbE infrastructure. While broad adoption won’t start until 2011, late 2010 is when companies are likely to start making major architectural decisions.”*

We agree that major OEMs will announce products in late Q4 and early 2010, and IT managers will evaluate and pilot projects in the second and third quarters of 2010 with real deployments occurring in late 2010 or early 2011.

“Beyond the current economic difficulties, the emergence of cloud computing and new approaches to datacenter deployments based on a highly specialized or virtualized design promise to create new disruptions in storage interconnect requirements.”*

We have already given a number of presentations at key industry events and have many more coming up about how the cloud, network convergence and Emulex are aligned to create universal access to block-, file- and object-based data.

“IDC expects accelerated deployment of FCoE CNAs (market revenue for these products will approach $340 million in 2012).”*

This market is real and network convergence is going to be key technology for data centers as 10Gb/s Ethernet blade computing comes to the forefront of deployments over the next two years.

It is easy to be cynical about predictions for the future as many people have vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Other companies may place bets on both sides and don’t care which one wins. Still others need the future to be different to win. Emulex is fortunate in that we have we strong bets on both the current Fibre Channel and the upcoming converged network markets. So, do we really care if this transition happens? You bet. Network convergence is about all kinds of networking (IP, storage and clustering) and it will be the key directional vector for not only us, but our entire industry, to follow for the next decade. As IDC said in their title,”…while Laying the Ground Work for FCoE and 10GbE,” we are working with OEMs, channel partners and ecosystem partners to move from groundwork to constructing the converged networking future.

*IDC, 2009 Storage Networking Infrastructure 2009-2013 Forecast – Server Slow Down Stifles FC HBAs and Switch Sales, while Laying the Ground Work for FCoE and 10GbE, doc #218480, May/2009

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