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Live From SNW: Page 5 of 10

11:50 AM -- As I am learning, it can be a mistake to overbook meetings at a tradeshow -- especially when there are lots of companies with interesting announcements and things to say. You can never spend as much time as you would like talking to any one of them.

Take LSI Logic, which showed 1 million IOPs on a standard Windows server running SAS drives with three of its controllers. Very impressive. LSI continues to dominate the storage-related silicon that goes on server-attached storage and is well positioned to take advantage of 6-Gig SAS technology.

And then there was cloud storage provider Nirvanix, which announced its relationship with Ocarina to optimize data before it moves to the cloud. Leveraging Nirvanix Cloud NAS, customers can now significantly reduce the amount of data that is sent across the Internet to the Nirvanix storage data center. Ocarina is on a bit of a roll, with OEMs looking to offer optimized storage. It has struck deals with BlueArc, HP, Isilon, and now Nirvanix, which, for its part, continues to extend its reach, with more than 400 customers.

9 AM -- I attended the Brocade press conference, where they announced and showed their FCoE products. In a later one-on-one meeting with Brocade, we went through the strategy in detail. Their FCoE plans are a very straightforward top-of-rack strategy. The switch will have 20 10-Gbit/s ports for converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) and eight 8-Gbit/s Fibre Channel (FC) ports. This falls in line with the recommended deployment strategy that we covered in the unified-infrastructure, single-fabric data center article in InformationWeek.

What is interesting is that Brocade has essentially held serve in the FCoE/Unification match with Cisco, yet they continue to also invest in FC and are openly committed to deliver 16-Gig Fibre Channel. Cisco, which was not at the show, has not made a similar commitment.