We are now living in a converged enterprise infrastructure change over.   Firms that are going fully to converged infrastructure will be the leaders in the enterprise and service provider infrastructure.  Two examples are HP and QLogic.  Both HP and QLogic are pumping out some serious market leading products that address a relevant and fast growing segment of the infrastructure – converged infrastructure.

I had a chance to hang out with QLogic when they donated half their booth at Oracle Openworld to us to run #theCube live internet TV at the show.  I heard first hand from their OEM customers that QLogic is the far and away leading FC vendor.  Their product are just superior one tech friend told me.  I’m impressed with their vision and products they are delivering.

Back in June we covered how HP and QLogic announced a new Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) switching ASIC that will change the landscape around fully converged devices.  We are now living in a converged enterprise infrastructure change over.

I was referring to the what QLogic called “The “Bullet” – a converged networking switch-on-a-chip.  This was all about the consolidation of the datacenter, multi-protocol on one board, integrated stacks, infrastructure as a service (aka cloud), and the movement toward the datacenter operating system.

At the recent HP event in Barcelona on Tuesday (which we have video of) Dave Donatelli the EVP of HP’s Converged Infrastructure Group said that the biggest problem facing datacenter guys is the fact that they have to overbuild to handle and manage peek demand.  This leads to many inefficiencies that HP is addressing and now QLogic.

The reality is without “converged infrastructure” there would be no cloud market.

Product Leadership

From a technology standpoint the ability to shift protocol support on the fly was the big piece of the announcement in that QLogic had more flexibility built into the switch than anyone in the business could have thought possible in 2010. Now QLogic has integrated similar technology into its converged network adapters—or CNAs—making protocol-agnostic data mobility available at the server adapter level as well. Switches with protocol agnosticity, servers with protocol agnosticity—this is what cloud server providers have been asking for.

With the ability to shift protocol support on-the-fly—from iSCSI to FCoE to 10Gb Ethernet—cloud service providers can support different workloads on different SANs as rapidly as the business requires using QLogic’s new 3GCNA portfolio. Cloud environments can deploy a server architecture that can move as fluidly and flexibly as their business requires. Servers don’t have to be shut down, rebooted, and no additional adapters have to be installed because you now have one CNA that supports all major networks and protocols—one at a time or all at the same time. We believe this will be a major enabler to companies building out private and public clouds who are looking for their server environments to be more pliable and adaptable.

The Bullet is available in HP’s Virtual Connect FlexFabric module and in HP’s A5820 data-center class Ethernet switch—two major FCoE switching design wins that didn’t go to Brocade or Cisco.

Enter Adaptive Convergence

As part of today’s 3GCNA product announcement, QLogic introduced its new overarching strategy for delivering flexible network resources across the enterprise—Adaptive Convergence.

Top technology players and enterprises are all rolling out strategies focusing on the converged enterprise, cloud service providers and virtualized data centers, Adaptive Convergence provides the foundation for QLogic to deliver the data center connectivity layer that enables its OEMs to successfully target these next generation service-based applications. With a higher degree of convergence and virtualization than Emulex, Brocade, Broadcom or Intel—from switch to server—QLogic is now providing the vital interconnect technology to make the promise of truly converged compute, storage, and network resources a reality.

The bottom line is QLogic is delivering substance and tangibility where its competitors are pumping out same old products.

What’s Next?

The key is to look at the design wins from QLogic verses the competitors.  Judging by the fact that HP, IBM, Dell and EMC were all quoted in this morning’s press release, we’d say that’s a good indicator of who’s taking the product next.

As Ethernet ramps from 10GbE adoption to 40Gb and then to 100Gb, there will be room to converge more networks and protocols than you can currently accommodate on a single 10GbE pipe. And when that time comes, only QLogic has the expertise and IP in InfiniBand and HPC—both increasingly critical elements in the cloud—just as we have seen at Oracle Open World lately.

My Angle

With the competitors not even close to QLogic in terms of product leadership QLogic appears to have all the right pieces to provide total converged solutions that address all networking segments: data, storage and HPC.

We found this company back in February when HP divorced Cisco and to date they show no signs of slowing down in either execution or innovation for the cloud. QLogic is two generations ahead of the competition and we hear there are other new innovations and critical design wins around the corner. For competitors, it’s clearly time to start innovating or just pack it in.

Update:  I changed the title to reflect what Randy Bias points out in the comments – it’s really about enterprise cloud

Randy says

This isn’t driving cloud.  No cloud today uses converged networking.  Converged networking is complex and expensive.  It’s strictly enterprise computing, not cloud computing.

I hate to call you on it, but this article is way off base.  FCoE is a transition protocol, CNA isn’t relevant in cloud, and complexity kills scale.  Since cloud is about delivering IT at scale, converged networks is anathema to the whole idea of cloud computing.

My response
Private cloud aka enterprise has fcoe to deal with. My point is that converging ports is a good thing especially multi protocol and io demands. Looking at storage in particular the io bandwidth requirments are needed at scale. Cisco, VMware, and EMC are all talking fcoe for the cloud… also fc according to some analysts is the #1 virtualization technology in vmware shops..

Here is a video of cloud CEOs including Randy Bias who commented above.