This morning my friend at Wikibon Project, Dave Vellante, posted an inside baseball analysis on some QLogic news this morning. His post ties directly into a post I was writing this morning on the dynamics of Private Cloud and how storage is sexy.  I think the QLogic news Dave dives into is a big datapoint in the big picture of the cloud game – storage.  There is a big picture evolving.

Enterprise IT Landscape – Real-time web, Cloud, and Mobility

The landscape of the IT infrastructure market is changing fast these days. Over the past eight months the emergence of the real time web, cloud computing, and mobility have really changed the game on enterprise IT. It’s all revolving around the new definitions of cloud computing.

Cloud computing has thrown the old notions of computing, storage, and networking on its’ head.

Performance matters in the private cloud and stack wars, and this is realigning the big players and giving the little guys with good products a big opportunity to be a big part of the overall “pie”.  One player in particular is QLogic – a company that I discovered a few months ago when QLogic shook the industry with a big move against Cisco in getting the HP deal for Fibrechannel over Ethernet switches (FCoE).

Private Cloud & Stack War Ripple Effect

We have been covering the public private cloud market and the recent stack wars, and it’s clear that the big battles between the “whales” like HP, Cisco, Juniper, and Oracle, SUN, HP, SAP have created a ripple effect that has reached the entire ecosystem in high performance computing such as Qlogic and many other startups that are emerging – even Google is announcing their own cloud and storage solution.

Today, Qlogic a niche player in storage traffic announces anther OEM deal in Infiniband that highlights this big trend. A few months ago QLogic replaced Cisco at HP and now more moves from QLogic. QLogic announced another deal in a string of OEM deals that puts them as a neutral palyer in the high performance computing market. Today it’s them solidifying their InfiniBand technology with Voltaire as part of the company’s end-to-end portfolio of QDR InfiniBand solutions. Recently they have been running the table on deals with all the big dogs like HP, Dell, EMC, etc.

All of this is inside baseball in the tech industry but the impact is felt across global IT solutions. That is networking, server, and storage traffic can no longer be managed in a silo’d manner, but instead must be converged to yield a full complete private cloud solution.

Big Picture Impact
Google, Juniper, Cisco, HP, SAP, and QLogic are examples of how this is changing. Old strategies are evolving to be more open and more focused on taking advantages of new forces in computing power. Developers and enterprise IT is reacting by changing their strategies, alliances, and vendor relationships. New market opportunities are opening up.

Why High Performance Computing Matters – Converged High Performance Traffic Matters

With the big datacenter trends revolving around converged infrastructures the traffic patterns are driving innovation and change. In particular the notion of neworking, storage, and interprocess communication traffic are important variables. These elements were once managed in silos, but now are converging as one force in an integrated datacenter architecture.

In a tweet this morning Robert @rwc101010 says

“having just deployed all my intel app servers on infiniband, this will be very disruptive to incumbant vendors like cisco.”

–Private cloud with high performance computing (HPC) will enable the use of supercomputing clusters to perform the rendering and analysis work that workstations have been doing in recent years. Translation: You render Iron Man 2 in days rather than 9 months.

–High performance computing (HPC) in the cloud will enable companies to accelerate animation rendering and molecular analysis and expedite visually-intensive products to market.

–Key uses for high performance computing (HPC) in the cloud include biotech simulations, derivative analytics, distributed databases, intelligence apps, oil & gas computations and animation rendering.

–Interoperable with an increasing amount of high performance computing (HPC) cluster computing configurations is a must to provide the flexibility for customers.

Recent Industry News Validates This Trend

In news just last week and today we see Juniper launching their “new network” by introducing a revolutionary 3-2-1 network architecture which reduces the complexity in network architecture in removing layers to increase performance. This increase in performance comes from the efficiencies in software and virtualization.

Just today Qlogic a company that we’ve been watching just announced another win with their high performance comuting (HPC) solution being sold by HPC technology provider Voltaire who will be selling QLogic Quad Data Rate InfiniBand adapters.  (Thanks to Dave Vellante from Wikibon.org for pointing this out today).

Niche Important Element of Cloud – Qlogic Becoming a Major Player With Big Datacenter Brands

Qlogic is an example of a company that does one thing really well – a niche that matters in storage traffic in the cloud. Here is their announcement today.

QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC) today announced that its QDR InfiniBand host channel adapters (HCAs) will be available from Voltaire (Nasdaq:VOLT) as part of the company’s end-to-end portfolio of QDR InfiniBand solutions. Fully tested for interoperability, Voltaire will offer QLogic® 7300 Series HCAs alongside its Grid Director™ line of QDR InfiniBand switches and software, providing HPC customers with end-to-end 40 Gb/s InfiniBand performance.

“The QLogic 7300 Series is a highly compelling QDR InfiniBand HCA that complements all of our high performance Grid Director 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “This collaboration with QLogic enables us to offer customers more highly scalable connectivity options from one convenient source.”

“This agreement marks the continued expansion of our InfiniBand HCAs in the HPC market place,” said Jesse Parker, vice president and general manager, Network Solutions Group, QLogic. “QLogic 7300 Series HCAs deliver a higher messaging rate and lower scalable latency than any comparative cluster interconnect available today. Delivering a message rate of 30 million messages per second, the QLogic 7300 Series outperforms comparative QDR adapters by a ratio of more than five to one1. We look forward to collaborating with Voltaire to address customers’ increasingly complex HPC requirements.”

Why This Matters

On the surface, you might think who cares. But there is a big trend going on in the world of IT when it comes to storage traffic and with storage traffic there is only a few vendors who deliver solutions in that space: QLogic, Brocade, and Emulex. Of those three QLogic owns their own IP, and has the most robust and high performance solution.

As a result Qlogic is becoming the preferred provider of switches and cards for storage traffic on high performance infrastructures and clouds. This is a big component in the cloud computing equation.

Here are some of the highlights that got Qlogic on our radar screen:
–Cisco gets dumped by HP for QLogic, while Brocade gets put on notice.
–Brocade Fibrechannel switch sales are down 20% in the most recent quarter according to industry analysts.
–QLogic Fibrechannel switches get picked up at EMC, another negative for Brocade.
–Brocade has turned on its key partners by selling Ethernet switching solutions that compete with the likes of HP’s ProCurve and 3Com Ethernet products.
–Cisco is competing with its key server partners, such as Dell, Oracle and HP, by pushing its UCS servers and waging a war for the hotly contested converged infrastructure market in next generation data centers.
–Today’s news QLogic boots Mellanox out at Voltaire.  Mellanox has been a supplier for many years a big blow to them.

Bottom line: So there are obvious tectonic landscape shifts happening in the IT cloud space. With the increasing prevalence of cloud and high performance comping with cloud architectures, it makes both business and technology sense that QLogic is being picked up by Voltaire and others for the preferred HPC cloud computing solutions.

My Angle – Struggle to Get to 10G Ethernet With Storage
The common theme among all the big datacenter vendors is a focus on on high performance computing. High performance computing is a central piece of their cloud formula. This little market of FCoE and HPC adapters like Infiniband provide the pipe between storage and servers. As storage evolves to be more like servers and networking, the interconnect environment becomes critical infrastructure. Old technologies in Fibrechannel and Infiniband must evolve to be innovative and compatible to the cloud model.

Most enterprises and big vendors want to go Ethernet but it’s difficult to do given the importance of storage in the cloud equation. We saw that clearly at EMC World where storage is converging with computing – this is key to EMC’s strategy in their “Journey to the Private Cloud”.

At the Juniper big press release last week they talked about the importance of collapsing the server, storage, and networking technologies. Here we see this little battle around Fibrechannel and Infiniband.

In this new era of cloud computing and converged infrastructure, partners are becoming competitors at an increasingly rapid, alarming pace, as outlined by the examples above. Companies that are neutral like QLogic are in a position to benefit as they pose no competitive threat and primarily exist to provide enabling networking technology in the war for the next gen data center.  In this market startups and mid size companies might want to take this same approach by being neutral.

A new approach like Qlogic is important because big enterprise customers are moving in that direction. Big enterprise customers want to bust down the silos to create not just IT solutions but drive top line revenue and business growth. In that regard the private cloud is the preferred architecture.

Busting Down the Silo’s – Customer Perspective – Levis CIO Tom Peck

At SAP Sapphire I sat down with Levi’s CIO Tom Peck to talk about simplifying the enterprise and his angle is about breaking down the silos. A relevent interview in this discussion. #memeconnect #qlogic

Watch live video from The Cube LIVE from SAPphire on Justin.tv

Here is an interview that I did at EMC World with QLogic VP Scott Genereux where we talk about Qlogic. I find it very interesting that this once dormant area of fibrechannel switches, adapters and high performance InfiniBand storage cards have moved to the center of the cloud discussion. Fact is storage traffic is becoming increasingly important to converged infrastructure.

Here the interview that we did at The Cube at EMC World:

Watch live video from The Cube LIVE from SAPphire on Justin.tv