Where Are You?

Joe wrote an excellent guest blog on my website called To Blade Or Not To Blade and offered me the same opportunity. Being a huge fan of Joe’s I'm honored. One of my favorites blog posts is his Data Center 101: Server Virtualization. Joe explained the benefits of server virtualization in the data center. I felt this post is appropriate because Joe showed us that virtualization is “supposed” to make life easier for Customers.  However, a lot of vendors have yet to come up with management tools that facilitate that concept. 

It’s a known fact that I’m a huge Underdog fan. However, what people don’t know is that Scooby-Doo is my second favorite cartoon dog. As a kid I always stayed current with the latest Underdog and Scooby-Doo after school episodes. This probably explains why my mother was always upset with me for not doing my homework first. I always got a kick out of the fact that no matter how many times Mystery Inc. would split up to find the ghost, it was always Scooby-Doo and Shaggy that managed (accidentally) to come face-to-face with the ghost while looking for food. Customers face the same issues that Scooby and Shaggy faced in ghost hunting. If a Customer was in VMware vCenter doing administrative tasks there was no way to effectively manage HBA settings (the ghost) without hunting around or opening a different management interface. Emulex has solved that issue with the new OneCommand Manager Plug-in for vCenter (OCM-VCp).

Being a former Systems Administrator in a previous life. I understand frustrations in opening multiple management interfaces to do a task(s). Emulex has already simplified infrastructure management with OneCommand. In OneCommand Customers already have the capability to manage HBAs across all protocols, generations, see/change CEE settings,  and do batch firmware/driver parameter updates (amongst a myriad of other capabilities).

 

 Not convinced? No problem. Let me introduce you to OCM-VCp interface. Take a look, you know have the opportunity to centrally discover, monitor and manage HBAs across the infrastructure from within vCenter, including vPort to to VM associations. How cool is that? Very.

 

 You get all the functions of the OneCommand HBA management application. No more looking for the elusive ghost that is called HBA settings. No more going back and forth between management interfaces. Which increases the probability of messing up the settings. However, out of all the cool capabilities here are the top 4 functions that I feel stand out for vCenter:

 

In my opinion this couldn't have come any sooner. As more organizations look to do more with less (virtualization principle) OCM-VCp will be the cornerstone of easing infrastructure management within VMware vCenter.  There is no learning curve because the plug-in has the same look and feel as the standalone management interface. In other words is very intuitive. So if you or your Customer(s) are expanding their adoption of virtualization take serious look at this plug-in, because it's going to make your life so much easier.

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How Emulex Broke Out of the ‘Card Pusher’ Box

A few years back when my primary responsibility was architecting server, blade, SAN, and virtualization solutions for customers I selected the appropriate HBA based on the following rule: Whichever (Qlogic or Emulex) is less expensive today through the server OEM I’m using.  I had no technical or personal preference for one or the other.  They were both stable, performed, and allowed my customers to do what they needed to do.  On any given day one might show higher performance than another but that’s always subject to the testing criteria and will be fairly irrelevant for a great deal of customers.  At that point I considered them both ‘Card Pushers.’

Last year I had the opportunity to speak at two Emulex Partner product launch events in the UK and Germany.  My presentation was a vendor independent technical discussion on the drivers for consolidating disparate networks on 10GE and above.  I had no prior knowledge of the exact nature of the product being launched, and didn’t expect anything more than a Gen 2 single chip CNA, nothing to get excited over.  I was wrong.

Sitting through the Key Note presentations by Emulex executives I quickly realized OneConnect was something totally different, and with it Emulex was doing two things:

  1. Betting the farm on Ethernet
  2. Rebranding themselves as more than just a card pusher.

Now just to get this out of the way Emulex did not, has not, and to my knowledge will not stop pursuing better and faster FC technology, their 4GB and 8GB FC HBAs are still rock solid high performance pure FC cards.  What they were however doing is obviously placing a large bet (and R&D investment) on Ethernet as a whole.

OneConnect:

The Emulex OneConnect is a Generation 2 Converged Network Adapter (CNA), but it’s a lot more than that.  It also does TCP offload, operates as an iSCSI HBA, and handles FCoE including the full suite of DCB standards.  It’s the Baskin Robins of of I/O interface cards, although admittedly  no FCoTR support ;-) (http://www.definethecloud.net/?p=380)  The technology behind the card impressed me but the licensing model is what makes it matter.  With all that technology built into the hardware you’d expect a nice hefty price tag to go with it.  That’s not the case with the OneConnect card, the licensing options allow you to buy the card at a cost equivalent to competing 10GE NICs and license iSCSI or FCoE if/when desired (licensing models may vary with OEMs.)  This means Emulex, a Fibre Channel HBA vendor, is happy to sell you a high performance 10GE NIC.  In IT there is never one tool for every job, but as far as I/O cards go this one comes close.

You don’t have to take my word for it when it comes to how good this card is, HP’s decision to integrate it into blade and rack mount system boards speaks volumes.  Take a look at Thomas Jones post on the Emulex Federal Blog for more info (http://www.emulex.com/blogs/federal/2010/07/13/the-little-trophy-that-meant-a-lot/.)  Additionally Cisco is shipping OneConnect options for UCS blades and rack mounts, and IBM also OEMs the product.

In addition to the OneConnect launch Emulex has also driven to expand their market into other areas, products like OneCommand Vision promise to provide better network I/O monitoring and management tools, and are uniquely positioned to do this through the eyes of the OneConnect adapter which can see all networks connected to the server.

Summary:

Overall Emulex has truly moved outside of the ‘Card Pusher’ box and uniquely positioned themselves above their peers.  In an data center market where many traditional Fibre Channel vendors are clinging to pure FC like a sinking ship Emulex has embraced 10GE and offers a product that lets the customer choose the consolidation method or methods that work for them.

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