Rob Crawford, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sale Sales at networking firm QLogic, discussed converged technologies, the switch business and the recent changes within the company with theCUBE host Stu Miniman, live at the 2013 edition of HP Discover.

“We’ve got big presence this year at the show,” Crawford said, commenting on HP Discover. “HP is a big strategic business partner for us. We show up every year, we typically have a great show over here.”

“Our switch business is based on an embedded strategy, most of our switch solutions are embedded with some OEM partners in some way,” he explained. “What was announced last week was a restructure. We are consolidating business units together, we found that we were fragmented,” therefore QLogic focuses on restructuring and consolidating their business units.

“It’s a good time to double down on the business,” Crawford said. “We are in the process of recruiting a CEO for the business. The company’s financial strength is phenomenal, we’ve got a lot of cash. We want to push our emerging technologies a lot faster.”

Qlogic on flash

Commenting on the state of the flash marketplace, Crawford said “you see a lot of SSD and flash technology through the storage technology today, you’ve got more network based solutions,” and array solutions. QLogic takes a different approach, “we have a server side solution – the technology is called fabric cache – we add SSD capability of cache technology to it. It’s transparent in how it fits into the infrastructure, and in the way it is deployed to the server,” and it also offers much better performance. “Because it sits in the fabric of the SAN, it’s able to participate in the SAN and we’re able to cluster cache between servers.” Servers are connected, aware of each other and can share the cache.

It’s all about convergence

As far as 16 gigabit fiber channel adoption is concerned, Crawford explained there is usually a slow uptake in the beginning, and then it speeds up. The typical cycle is of 3-5 years. “We’re seeing good adoption right now, we see very very high adoption of Qlogic converged technology on the target site. We’re hitting that part of the ramp where it’s transitioning faster.”

“A lot of people future-proof their architecture so that they can migrate quickly,” Crawford said. He also said QLogic keeps a very close eye on the fiber channel. “What we do inside the fiber fabric allows you to use it for something other than transmitting storage data,” such as cache clustering.

“Convergence as a market is evolving different that we though two years go,” Crawford added. “Converged infrastructure is about flexibility, supporting multiple protocols, different types of fabrics and making them work together.”

Watch the full interview here.