Emulex Highlights
- Introduces Gen 5 FC Flash Services technology products running at 16GFC
- CrossLink addresses the growth of East/West traffic with the use of vMotion
- ExpressLane helps with QoS and prioritisation of flash in hybrid storage solutions
- Identifies numerous types of IT migration to illustrate current market change
- Has a simple strategy – Connect, Monitor, Manage
- As a specialist NOC supplier strong OEM allies in IBM, HP and EMC
Here at SNW Europe in Frankfurt I had the chance to talk with SVP Shaun Walsh just before he went on stage to give a keynote presentation on Emulex’s vision of ‘Great IT Migrations’. You’ll want to learn more about its ideas and the new offerings it’s introducing.
The Great IT Migrations
Emulex is a relatively small network player offering NIC cards. Its OEMs include IBM (where we came across it at the introduction of PureSystems https://www.itcandor.com/ibm-puresystems/, HP, EMC and other large system vendors. Its quarterly revenues are currently around $120 Million (see Figure) and it employs just over 1k people.
Migration of various types is at the centre of its market view. In particular:
- Mass Mobility Migration – Shaun sees the film the Minority Report, where Tom Cruise’s profile is modified as he goes shopping as a good analogy for future changes, thinking ‘we will become the mobile device’ as the numbers and depth of Internet experiences increase; in turn this will drive deep changes in security, network bandwidth and applications
- Migration to Disaggregation – Sun’s tag line under Scott McNealy was ‘the network is the computer’ – Shaun thinks this will become even more true in the future
- Migration to ‘Software Defined’ – he sees this happening everywhere in the data centre, which he illustrates with the need of a major US Sports Channel needing to insert adverts in real time into its programmes across a 100 different networks; virtual Infrastructure products such as EMC Viper and Fusion-IO flash cards will help enable SDN;
- Migration of Servers – Shaun believes 40% will be deployed in the Cloud by 2020, with users buying increasing numbers from relatively unknown Chinese vendors
- Migration of Networking – he predicts that network traffic will grow 5 fold by 2016, driven mainly by the number of new people using the Internet and the deeper experiences of those already on it; he believes there will be 4 Billion users and that 30% of those will have 4 or more Internet devices each
- Migration of Storage – he believes that block, file and object storage will grow 3 times by 2016 and that there will be a big change in where storage lives, driven by how it is addressable, stating ‘It’s not the object, but its addressibility that matters’
- Migration to Flash – application delivery latency will be reduced 25 fold by 2016; Emulex offer 2.1m IOPs on its latest card, which is greater than the processing ability of servers today; there will be more emphasis on when data can be delivered and its consistency in future – a migration which will be driven by the combination of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), networking and flash drive applied together
- Migration of Channels in a Cloud market – he’s thinks channels will have to provide ‘Software Defined Value Add’ in future, creating mash-ups of different Web sites for their customers; no channel will remain the same in the Cloud era, which will break the traditional 2 tier model
Having thought about the deep influence these migrations will have on the market thought about the deep influence these migrations will have on the market Shaun acknowledges that 70% of Emulex’s revenues come from Fibre Channel (FC) offerings – buoyed by the fact that the back room of companies such as Facebook are based on FC and Oracle just like every other Enterprise.
Strategy, ExpressLane, CrossLink Launched At SNW Europe
Emulex strategy is based on just 3 concepts, which are:
- Connect – which is based on how you connect the enterprise Cloud together; its current offerings include 10/40G Ethernet and 16GFC flash optimisation NICs
- Monitor – visibility is very important in networking where you essentially read the shape of the words, rather than the words themselves – ‘you get the consonants not the vowels without 100% visibility’
- Manage – which is becoming more important than ever; he believes that OpenCompute and OpenStack will become the standard orchestration stack of the future
Emulex introduced 2 new ‘Gen 5 FC Flash Services technology’ products at SNW. In particular:
- ExpressLane – a NIC designed to help with mixed flash and disk SANs, including the ability to mark LUNs with tags to prioritise flash traffic in mission critical applications, QoS to alleviate congestion, reduce latency and improve throughput for high priority applications, the ability to turn it on and off without changing the FC environment using its OneCommand systems management
- CrossLink – a NIC designed for flash-based infrastructures to help with East/West traffic made more prevalent with the use of vMotion cache migration; it provides in-band FC message passing ensuring storage device connectivity based on lossless, standards-based FC protocols; it claims significant advantages over User Datagram Protocol/Internet Protocol (EDP/IP) in increased server utilisation and lower latency
So it continues to roll out FC products, albeit at 16GFC speeds. They are designed to help with some of the migrations he lists, although he readily admits that in future fewer people will care about what technology is used in the back end of their solutions.
Some Conclusions – Migration Is A Better Concept Than Transformation
Emulex has some strong allies among the system vendors as a specialist supplier of FC and other protocol NICs, although it observes that increasing numbers of servers are being sold by newish Chinese suppliers. Like its offerings its strategy is relatively simple – certainly in comparison with many of the other suppliers we have spoken to recently. I find Shaun’s ‘migration’ concepts fat more interesting than those of ‘convergence’ or ‘transformation’ – it’s a neutral term which should appeal to those managing change as opposed to those demanding it. In my experience there is always more change in specific technologies and their capabilities than the solutions they help to build.