December 1st, 2008
Virtualization and Emulex
Although I wouldn’t have thought of Emulex and virtualization technology at the same time, a conversation with the company changed my viewpoint. How did Emulex achieve the improbable? Read on.
Here’s what Emulex says about itself
Emulex makes a wide range of enterprise-class products that enable our customers to intelligently connect storage, servers, and networks. Whether you use our market-leading Fibre Channel HBAs, our industry-leading Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) CNAs or innovative embedded solutions to address emerging data center requirements, Emulex’s products provide the performance, interoperability, and scalability that enable your business to efficiently execute and grow.
Snapshot analysis
It is clear to me that a virtualized environment, regardless of whether is is based upon a platform of virtual machine, application virtualization or operating system virtualization/partitioning software, fundamentally stresses the I/O, networking and storage performance capabilities of IT infrastructure. The ability to consolidate workloads to achieve higher levels of optimization also mean that quite a bit more traffic is pushed over those channels. Emulex believes that their technology offers an answer.
Since Emulex technology is made available as part of server and storage products made by others, it would be necessary for organizations to ask about this technology when acquiring servers or storage systems. This, I guess, is the reason that they saught me out. I’m certain that is not because of my looks or sparkling personality.
It would seem wise for organizations to determine if their servers and storage systems have the capability of supporting the larger requirements of a virtualized environment before signing on the dotted line. Looking for a partnership with Emulex or one of its competitors might be a place to start.
Daniel Kusnetzky is a member of the senior management team of The 451 Group. He is responsible for research and publications on a broad array of technology topics. He examines emerging technology trends, vendor strategies, research and development issues, and end-user integration requirements. You can follow Dan on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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