It may be a slow boat to converged networks

July 14, 2010 – The hype behind converged networks (or converged fabrics) is heating up, leading one to believe that we’re on the cusp of this game-changer in IT infrastructure. However, I think this is going to be a very slow transition that will take place in two distinct phases.

First, IT organizations will migrate to 10Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), which is already well underway. As they do so, the underlying equipment (network adapters, switches) may in fact support a converged fabric (Ethernet LAN + Fibre Channel SAN via FCoE) but most users won’t take advantage of that functionality in the first phase of the migration.

For now, end users are primarily concerned about network performance, particularly in I/O-intensive environments such as virtual servers and, soon, virtual desktops (see “Storage considerations for VDI implementations,” by the Evaluator Group’s Russ Fellows and John Webster).

Faster Ethernet is priority #1, not truly converged fabrics. Remember, almost 90% of the server network ports in a data center are Ethernet.

This a central point in an InfoStor blog post from Frank Berry, CEO and senior analyst with IT Brand Pulse (see “3G C-NICs Address Mass Migration to 10GbE”).

In an end-user survey conducted by IT Brand Pulse, more than 70% of the users said they were either too busy to investigate convergence or were not planning to converge their networks (although that does leave 30% with at least a plan to do so).

According to Frank’s blog: “LAN and SAN convergence is happening today, but it’s deployment of LANs and iSCSI SANs that are making it happen. In 2010, less than 100,000 FCoE-enabled host network ports will be deployed, while over 1 million iSCSI host ports will be installed.”

Migration to 10GbE will go quickly, but the transition to a truly converged, single-wire network will go much more slowly.

One reason for this is not technology-related but, rather, cultural. More than ever, a converged network will require very close cooperation between the network and storage teams, which in some cases is like asking the Red Sox to merge with the Yankees.

Who’s in charge of product evaluation and purchasing? Who will “own” the converged network?

These factors, perhaps more than technology-related issues, could delay adoption of converged networks.

Related article:
Fabric convergence: Changing the nature of fabric attach

InfoStor welcomes new bloggers

January 15, 2010 – We recently added a couple of analysts/consultants to our blogger lineup: IT Brand Pulse’s Frank Berry and the Taneja Group’s Jeff Boles.

Frank is the CEO and a senior analyst at IT Brand Pulse, which conducts product reviews, surveys IT professionals on an ongoing basis and produces reports, including the IT Brand Leadership series. For my comments on one of IT Brand Pulse’s recent Brand Leadership survey results, see “Who are the (perceived) leaders in storage virtualization?"

Previously, Frank held senior executive positions with vendors such as QLogic and Quantum.

In his first post for InfoStor, he comments on storage virtualization, outlining the three phases, or eras, of the technology. See “EMC: Storage Virtualization Leader.”

Our other new blogger, Jeff Boles, is a senior analyst with the Taneja Group research and consulting firm. In his first post for infostor.com, Jeff takes a look at storage in 2010, touching on topics such as volume virtualization in enterprise arrays, WAN optimization, data deduplication, SSDs and, of course, the cloud. See “Storage for 2010 – Integration Innovation.”

Jeff also blogs on the Taneja Group site. Other Taneja Group analysts will occasionally share his blog spot.

The next addition to InfoStor’s Bits & Bytes blog will be a user/VAR blog, where IT storage professionals and channel professionals will share their opinions, insights and success stories. If you’re interested in occasionally participating, shoot me an email – daves@pennwell.com.

Who are the (perceived) leaders in storage virtualization?

December 21, 2009 – IT Brand Pulse recently surveyed 146 IT professionals, asking them which vendors they perceived as leaders in storage virtualization. In addition to the overall leader, other categories included price, performance, reliability, service and support, and innovation.

IT Brand Pulse gave the survey participants 12 vendor choices in each category: 3PAR, DataCore, Dell, EMC, FalconStor, Hitachi, HP, IBM, LSI, NetApp, Symantec and VMware.

And the winners are . . .

EMC took top honors as the perceived leader in the overall storage virtualization market, and also took the top spot in the reliability and service/support categories, while placing second in the innovation and performance categories.

NetApp took the top spots in innovation and performance and, strangely enough, placed second in all other categories.

Not surprisingly, Dell was #1 in the price category and, surprisingly, was #3 in the market leader and performance categories.

VMware was #3 in price and innovation, while IBM placed third in reliability and service/support.

The other seven vendors each got less than 10% of the vote in all of the categories.

Here are the win, place, show vendors in each category, with the percentage of end-user votes they received.

Market leader: EMC (26%), NetApp (19.9%), Dell (12.3%)
Price: Dell (27.4%), NetApp (22.6%), VMware (17.1%)
Performance: NetApp (24.7%), EMC (21.2%), Dell (11%)
Reliability: EMC (28.1%), NetApp (15.8%), IBM (12.3%)
Service and support: EMC (28.8%), NetApp (19.9%), IBM (11.6%)
Innovation: NetApp (25.3%), EMC (21.9%), VMware (11%)

Frank Berry, IT Brand Pulse’s CEO and senior analyst – and infostor.com’s newest blogger – recently blogged about storage virtualization. I like his lead:

“They say humans recognize the smell of chili, but dogs can detect the smell of different spices in the chili. Similarly, humans recognize storage virtualization, but industry experts see clear distinctions between the different types of storage virtualization.”

Frank goes on to outline the first two phases of storage virtualization, and provides a glimpse into the emerging third phase (heterogeneous storage virtualization in the cloud). And he also gives his view on which vendor was first to market with storage virtualization. Hint: It was in 1970.

Read Frank’s blog here.

Who are the leaders in InfiniBand?

November 10, 2009 – With the Supercomputing 09 conference kicking off next week, the spotlight will be on InfiniBand, which has become the interconnect of choice for high performance computing (HPC) clusters. Despite InfiniBand’s success in the HPC market, there are still relatively few vendors, and only three are perceived as leaders, according to a recent survey conducted by IT Brand Pulse.

According to the survey, Mellanox is (by a long shot) perceived as the overall leader in InfiniBand networking and InfiniBand adapters, and Voltaire is perceived as the leader in InfiniBand switches. QLogic was also cited in each of the three categories.

Specifically, Mellanox was cited as the leader in InfiniBand networking by 82.4% of the survey respondents, followed by Voltaire (11.8%) and QLogic (5.9%).

More than 91% said that Mellanox was the leader in InfiniBand adapters, followed by QLogic at 8%.

And 66.4% of the HPC users cited Voltaire as the market leader in InfiniBand switches, followed by QLogic at 27.7% and Mellanox at 5.9%.

IT Brand Pulse surveys the end-user community on an ongoing basis, and provides reports based on the survey results. Highlights of the survey results are posted on infostor.com.

IT Brand Pulse is currently surveying end users regarding their perceptions of vendors in the data deduplication, iSCSI storage and adapters, and tape library markets. The survey takes less than 5 minutes and participants have a chance to win an Apple iPhone 3GS from IT Brand Pulse. If you want to participate in these surveys (and I highly encourage you to do so), click here.