Find me one OEM--besides the remnants of Verari--that stocks UCNA specifically for FCoE. I would love to talk to them and get a feel for how things are going with the UCNA. In my book, any company that claims one million IOPs can be achieved with its product using 512 byte block sizes, when real-world applications like Microsoft Exchange run 4K byte block sizes, has a marketing problem. Focus on what customers can actually use in their production data centers to solve real world problems and don't waste their time with random "one million IOPS" claims. This is typical spin when products are lagging the competition in the marketplace. In 2010, I predict Emulex will indeed find moderate success reselling ServerEngines' NIC cards (as the "UCNA") but will continue to be a straggler in the actual FCoE horse race.
Egenera has the opportunity to become less irrelevant as Cisco ramps up its Unified Computing System (UCS) servers in 2010. This is a company that nailed the idea of combining compute, storage and networking resources in a single, unified data center "brick" six years ago, but for a number of reasons, they never executed well enough to make serious market inroads. Now, with Cisco essentially building a new "brick," Egenera could ride the new wave of interest being generated by Cisco.
Speaking with a number of user clients, it is becoming clearer that enterprises are paying more attention to "unified and utility" computing solutions - especially with the VMware, Cisco, EMC coalition and the recently announced VMware, Cisco and NetApp pact. With $180M invested in Egenera since 2000, and with the company now claiming to be "software-centric" and half the size it used to be, I'm not sure what kind of ROI its investors actually expect. Analytico predicts that Egenera should look for a buyer--quickly--before the Cisco UCS wave becomes a tsunami - and while stepped up innovation can keep the offering competitive.
So that's my take -- do you agree? Disagree? Have any predictions of your own to add?
