Greg Scherer is Broadcom’s Vice President of Server and Storage Strategy for the Infrastructure and Networking Group. A technology industry veteran with nearly thirty years of experience in engineering and business development, he sat down with theCube hosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman of Wikibon, to talk about the server virtualization and the future changes in the infrastructure at EMC World 2013.

For the discussion with theCube hosts, Greg highlighted that server virtualization kicked off a wave of change in infrastructure. This change is riplling through storage and networking as well. In the beginning, this business simply meant combining a couple of servers under one platform. Consolidation over ethernet is happening now, and convergence between storage and networking is the next step. We are witnessing a technology shift driven by economics. A lot of the cloud-centric data centers, both public and private, drive the need for virtualized networking.

Today, if you want to migrate a VM from one server to another, those servers need to exist under the same subnet; this is only practical on a small scale. But when talking about global data centers, with one data center in Norway and another in NYC, it’s highly unlikely that they would share the same subnet.

Broadcom’s role in virtualized networking

Broadcom is so vital to this virtual networking business that Scherer is convinced that in any data center there is at least one Broadcom component inside, be it network procesors or ethernet controllers. At this event Broadcom is displaying the new cards, Ethernet NICs. In addition to the NICs, Broadcom has a big presence in the switch market place. Most 10 GB switches have a Broadcom silicon inside. Greg Scherer thinks of Broadcom as the foundation of this ground where software meets the hardware.

What Broadcom is learning from the hyperscale space is that the question of convergence between storage and networking (that is still being addressed in the enterprise), has long been answered here. It all comes down to Ethernet. Storage and network is all ethernet, the lower latency is also all ethernet. Convergence happened there very early on. Within the context of the hyperscale environment, the server virtualization was driven there on massive scale.

If 20 years ago technology was adopted because it was cool, nowadays such decisions are all economically driven. Server virtualization is a huge driver for the adoption of 10 Gb+.

As far as cost is concerned, there has been a tendency to keep a broad gap between 1 Gb and 10 Gb pricing, but that’s starting to break down now and Greg Scherer is convinced that in the Ivy Brigde cycle there’s going to be significantly more 10 Gb adoption.