Stu Miniman, Senior Analyst at Wikibon, invited Shaun Walsh, SVP Marketing and Corp Dev at Emulex, to talk about the intersection of storage and networking during theCUBE’s live broadcast from IBM Edge 2013 in Las Vegas this week.

Emulex recently acquired a company called Endace, and the decision left certain people in the industry a bit confused. Explaining the decision, Walsh narrated the whole endeavour of Emulex looking at storage management from an end-to-end perspective. Analyzing all forms of storage out there, they came to the conclusion that they lacked the right information in order to do their job, because not all the capabilities inside the networks were lossless. Investigating options, they came across Endace as a solution. There was a great deal of similarity in the way they approached the market in terms of capture capabilities, the analysis and the recording of the information, and the ability to play it back, pointing out the challenges in the network.

As the Ethernet business grew, they started adding custom stacks, and what they noticed was that they only knew what happened at the end points, and not in the middle. The Endace product, on the other hand, could only monitor the middle, not the end points. It really felt like a good “marriage of technology”, as Emulex and Endace could solve the challenges of increased network performance and scalability. Together, they are able to provide the only end-to-end Network Performance Management (NPM) solution, as they are combining and integrating Ethernet end points and network path visibility into a single NPM infrastructure.

However, this decision was not intuitive for most people because, with Emulex involvement in the business of Etherrnet and fiber, they expected it would pursue another Enterprise Network. Emulex is trying to expand beyond their core market.

This service is rather an augmentation to the existing business, sitting in the sideline of the switches, routers and the other traffic management equipment. It essentially records network traffic, serving as a service platform for the analytics. Emulex is not trying to come up with better security software than the existing ones, but it is offering a 100 percent capture service and the “forensic” capability to look into the data to identify the problem. Their solution is used by a major sports broadcasting company, a major e-commerce site (preventing fraud), and by other clients for denial of service. In all these situations, the clients have what Shaun calls “death by dashboard”, they have hundreds of dashboards that allert them something is wrong, but no technology able to perform root-cause analysis. And that’s where Emulex comes into place.

Watch the entire interview above, as Shaun gives insight on his own presentation at the IBM Edge 2013 conference, touching on several interesting topics such as Flash impacting architecture, the hyperscale players and the dynamic changes in terms of how companies go to market.