I guess the cake is a lie.

I guess the cake is a lie.

The just annonced VCE coalition, and new joint venture “Acadia” will certainly have the unique abiltiy to leverage the newest innovations and best-of-breed technologies. Simply stated, I see this group moving forwad rapidly with FCoE.

What about the balance of the I.T. shops? Adoption of and integration of FCoE is on a curve and time-line that has been widely defined by many pundits. Emulex has delived its new strategy and rolled the dice…will it make its number, or crap out?

One little outlier that no one has really talked about is the LOM business. In that integration, this layered licensing model makes PERFECT sense since the control stacks are usually passed up THROUGH the server management console and consequently can be updated based on a dependency tree. Starting out with a 10GbE implementation and growing to a full-bore DCE/CEE/FCoE fabric could be accomplished relatively easily. Does that make sense?

anyhow, good thoughts from Shaun and others!!!

cheers,

Dave

However, keeping it closer to home and keeping it more real…….. This is exactly the same as the model we have for switches and arrays. A switch and an array ships with all of the code for vaious functionality locked away behind a license key.

Want to unlock COW, replication capabilities, cache pinning… in an array – buy a license!

Want to unlock advanced performance monitoring, zoning or advanced features – buy a license.

So it follows nicely….

Want to unlock advanced features such asFCoE, iSCSI offload etc on a CNA – buy a license.

For me it makes perfect sense, especially since it starts at the price point of a 10Gbps Ethernet adapter and apparently wont cost more in the long run.

Oh and Im sure it makes sense for Emulex too – after all they're not quite ready with all of the features yet are they

I wrote about it here a few days ago – http://blogs.rupturedmonkey.com/?p=553

Nigel

This post was mentioned on Twitter by davegraham: Blog Post: Frosting the FCoE Cake… http://bit.ly/3kVU1h...

http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/emu...

First, I am sure we are the vendor in question.

The goal here is to provide choice and options. You can buy a UCNA from Emulex in several different flavors: a NIC only with hardware offload, NIC + iSCSI hardware offload, NIC + FCoE hardware offload or NIC + iSCSI + FCoE hardware offload. We did this at the behest of OEM manufactures like IBM. If you look at their Virtual Fabric Adapter (VFA) http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardw... as an example, they want to provide a cost effective 10Gb/s NIC with a path forward to iSCSI and FCoE hardware offload without making customers pay for everything all at once. If you are looking at the world from a server perspective this makes perfect sense and provides product differentiation. Emulex's new OneConnect UCNAs have full hardware protocol offload support for TCP/IP, iSCSI and FCoE. However, unlike many of our competitors, we think customers should have the OPTION to pay-as-you-go vs. having to pay-all-at-once for things they don’t need.

However, if you are looking at the world from storage perspective, as Deni Connor of Storage Strategies Now did in her new paper on FCoE adoption http://bit.ly/4vVVVA, then you would skip the base NIC and go right to a full FCoE UCNA. We agree with her that current FC implementations would not utilize the pay-as-you-go option, but we're providing a solution for IT managers moving directly to FCoE as well.

Emulex has a simple goal: to expand the market for network convergence, and that means we have to enable 10Gb/s Ethernet as well as 10Gb/s iSCSI and 10Gb/s FCoE with our OneConnect UCNAs. So if you need a 10Gb/s NIC today with network convergence investment protection or if you are ready to jump in to FCoE all at once, our pay-as-you-go UCNA plan lets you have the proverbial cake and eat too, with multiple flavors for any taste.

Shaun Walsh
Emulex