In a previous blog, I said it appeared to me that we were headed for a two horse race with regard to FCoE. Well, a few of you have made your cases to me (and not just snide posts in the blog comments area) and I have listened intently. I agree that we should include a few more horses on the track and keep a close eye on them as they gallop toward a market place finish line.
Well, we just hit a milestone in storage: considered the world's largest storage company, EMC is now implementing QLogic FCoE technology across its entire product line. This is definitely an inflection point - imagine how many FCoE cards EMC and QLogic will jointly ship. Clearly the FCoE adoption rate will accelerate now that EMC is behind this a single chip connectivity product.
EMC's V-Max, fairly new on storage scene, now gets a connectivity boost with the ability to leverage full FCoE bandwidth across host connections - which will be needed when working with massively powerful Nehalem EX processors.
This is a big win for QLogic and builds on their trajectory of strong FCoE design wins - 3 at IBM, 2 at NetApp and qualifications across nearly all of EMC's storage portfolio: V-Max, DMX, CX-4 and NS Celerra.
QLogic is accumulating significant business deployment wins for its 8100 Series CNAs for FCoE. In contrast, Emulex just announced a design win with IBM BladeCenter using someone else's Ethernet NIC. It appears that it's not an Emulex design win, but a ServerEngines' design win