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ShareQlogic Gives Emulex A Black Eye
Posted by Tom Trainer on October 20, 2009
With exclusive design wins at NetApp & IBM, and offering the only single chip CNA you can get from EMC today, QLogic continues to pommel its competitors. If this was a boxing match, Emulex would be Gerry Cooney in the 1990 bout with George Foreman.
For IT vendors, when a big customer has been buying tens of millions of dollars worth of your products each year, life is good. Wall Street is happy with your recurring revenue stream, your market outlook is upbeat, and you can showcase that big customer's brand to attract new business.
The problem with large revenue streams for IT vendors is that the vendors sometimes become complacent. They assume the business will continue to exist unchallenged. They make the same product every year with minimal upgrades, living off a cash cow. In the case of Fibre Channel adapters, Emulex was living large off of revenue from IBM Power Systems, bringing in approximately $100M a year from its FC adapter business. As the only provider to IBM Power Systems, Emulex got all the divisions' FC adapter business.
However, as is typical, industry players have not stood still, and Emulex has taken some solid hits. As the industry started to make plans to migrate to converged network FCoE adapters (CNA's), Emulex has been battling with having no Ethernet stack of its own. The company has scrambled to lash together a product known as "UCNA" with Server Engines in an effort to avoid defeat and try to gain some FCoE design wins and avoid an early round knock-out. The strategy isn't working; IBM Power Systems is sole sourcing single-chip CNAs for FCoE from QLogic. The single chip part is important because it reduces power consumption and enables systems vendors to integrate FCoE much more easily. I believe Emulex just lost its biggest customer to its main rival, and Emulex is out telling Wall Street that network convergence will be a big revenue driver for them--so much for that story.
One of Emulex's biggest customers has effectively told them that their FCoE offering isn't up to snuff, and that has to hurt. This is what happens in these heavyweight vendor battles when one side has been engaged in concentrated training and preparation, and the other side has been coasting on old wins. I believe EMC has also been a top customer for Emulex, and they haven't announced support and use of the "UCNA" either. Available information indicates that much like IBM, the only single-chip CNA that EMC has currently qualified is QLogic's 8100 Series. There is no confirmation that UCNA is even in EMC test labs yet.
I'm still thinking about who would be a good representation of Brocade in this heavyweight mash-up. Who would you suggest?
Comment by Tony on October 20, 2009 10:47 AM
This is devastating blow for Emulex. They just get dumped by their top customer!
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Comment by Sundeep on October 20, 2009 11:03 AM
Wow, Tom! How much are you paid to write articles for Q, like an Apple Fan-Boy?
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Comment by Brocade CNA also offered by IBM on October 20, 2009 11:06 AM
Let's not forget the Brocade CNA which is also a single chip design offered by IBM
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0718.html
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Comment by Brocade is not in Power Systems on October 20, 2009 11:14 AM
QLogic is exclusive on Power Systems. Brocade is available on System x but nobody actually sells Brocade CNAs...
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Comment by Simplicity makes 8100 win on October 20, 2009 12:20 PM
ETH stack is not so hard to implement considering Emulex has top-gun firmware engineers. I think they may have made a strategic mistake by implementing everything inside one chip, which makes the design much harder than just converging together FC/ETH stacks. At this moment, simple ETH stack is good enough, all those fancy intelligent or universal TCP/IP/iSCSI/IB/RDMA offload is not necessary.
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Comment by Sotuan on October 20, 2009 1:49 PM
It's guys like Tom that make Network Computing so irrelevant. He's an errand boy for either QLogic or Broadcom. Give me back my Byte & Switch!! This site is full of trolls.
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Comment by Sotuan on October 20, 2009 2:08 PM
I guess as always the answer here is "it depends". If you're doing FCoE, it needs to be in the CNA, period. For iSCSI, it's tough to get the performance unless you have assist on the card or you are willing to burn CPU running the stack. But is that really why you buy a server with a fast CPU? CNAs also tend to have nice virtualization features if your running VMWare or such.
If you just need a NIC... there are several that will run just fine.
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Comment by Green HDD on October 20, 2009 2:22 PM
Emulex is in serious trouble if they couldn't even get an FCoE win at IBM Power. This doesn't make me feel too comfortable about the future of the uCNA...
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Comment by Mike Fratto on October 20, 2009 3:11 PM
Sotuan, if you think Tom is a fan-boi (he's not) and think you can do better, drop me an email and let's see if it wouldn't make sense to put you on the blog roll.
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Comment by Brocade AR on October 21, 2009 10:20 AM
Below are excerpts from your blog which are factually incorrect:
1. "With exclusive design wins at NetApp & IBM, and offering the only single chip CNA you can get from EMC today, QLogic continues to pommel its competitors."
2. "Available information indicates that much like IBM, the only single-chip CNA that EMC has currently qualified is QLogic's 8100 Series."
Facts:
1. Brocade has a single chip CNA design with at NetApp, announced on August 11, 2009: http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news-rel-20090811-brocade-fcoe.html
2. Brocade has a single chip CNA design win at IBM. Here is an IBM Redbook At-A-Glance about it: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0718.html
3. EMC has qualified and sells the Brocade single chip CNAs. The Brocade 1010 and 1020 are qualified by eLab and are listed on the ESM and EMC Select as of October 14, 2009. EMC will be updating its public website within the next few weeks.
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Comment by Tom on October 21, 2009 3:41 PM
Brocade AR: Thanks for your comment. I will respond to each of your points, below:
1. ???Brocade has a single chip CNA design with at NetApp, announced on August 11, 2009:??? You are correct that Brocade can claim a design with NetApp: However, I understand that the Brocade CNA is qualified as a secondary CNA from the host side perspective, and that one of your competitors is qualified as the primary on the host side and is embedded inside NetApp systems on the target side.
2. ???Brocade has a single chip CNA design win at IBM:??? I understand that Brocade is qualified as a secondary CNA for IBM System X. If you have a different relationship with IBM on the System X please clarify with then and here.
3. ???EMC has qualified and sells the Brocade single chip CNAs. The Brocade 1010 and 1020 are qualified by eLab and are listed on the ESM and EMC Select as of October 14, 2009. EMC will be updating its public website within the next few weeks:??? I see the 1010 and 1020 listed in the publicly available EMC Support Matrix. You are not listed in the EMC Select products for sale and I have seen no public announcement of this.
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Comment by Tom on October 21, 2009 6:22 PM
Sotuan:Nice comment with regards to "it depends." Also, thanks for reminding me to not to be a troll (of course one definition of troll is a supernatural being...).I'll make sure you see a few blogs on FalconStor, 3PAR, Hitachi, NetApp and EMC-and no Sundeep they won't & don't.
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Comment by Brocade is Lost on October 21, 2009 6:38 PM
Brocade's CNA is only qualified at some vendors because they spent tens of millions of dollars incentivizing vendors and begging them to make this happen. Nobody actually sells Brocade CNAs or HBAs, they are considered a joke. A design win means you are INSIDE the product. Brocade CNAs are sitting on the junk pile.
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Comment by SpellingTutor on November 7, 2009 8:13 PM
Surely you mean "pummel", not "pommel" - Look it up. If this were a spelling bee you would be the sad kid who gets thrown out in the first round. If you write for a living you should be able to get simple things like this correct.....
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Comment by Tom Trainer on November 11, 2009 10:28 AM
Spelling: You're wrong. Pommel is simply a less common way of spelling pummel. And by the way, you used too many dots. It's...
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