During the vendor’s earnings results call Monday evening, Brocade reported nearly $40 million in revenue from 16-gig directors and switches in the first full quarter of availability. Brocade’s total FC revenue was approximately $303 million last quarter. The total FC revenue grew about 10% from the previous quarter, although it was down about 4% from last year. Brocade execs pointed out that all of the major storage vendors have qualified their 16-gig FC gear while rival Cisco has yet to support 16-gig FC.

Brocade execs said server virtualization and PCIe-based flash are pushing customers to the higher performing FC. They also say customers are sticking to FC instead of moving to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

“We saw a faster-than-expected ramp of our 16-gig portfolio of products,” Brocade CEO Mike Klayko said on the call. “This is perhaps the fastest and smoothest qualification process [with OEM partners] of any new product portfolio among our OEMs.”

Jason Nolet, Brocade’s VP of data center and enterprise networking, said FC remains the “premier storage networking technology for mission-critical apps.” He said Brocade is selling FCoE in top-of-rack switches but there is “almost no take-up” in end-to-end FCoE implementations. “Because of that, Fibre Channel continues to enjoy that kind of premier place in the hierarchy of technologies for storage networking,” he said.

The Brocade executives also played up the monitoring and diagnostics built into their 16-gig switches, suggesting the vendor will make more of a push into this area. Brocade customers have turned to third-party tools for this, such as Virtual Instruments’ Performance Probe. But Virtual Instruments CEO John Thompson recently complained that Brocade has been telling its customers not to use Virtual Instruments products despite having a cooperative marketing relationship in the past. The management aspect of Brocade switches will be worth watching in the coming months.

Brocade showcased its 1860 Fabric Adaptor at Storage Networking World (SNW) in Orlando, Fla., this week, which gives customers the option to implement 16 Gbps Fibre Channel, 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connectivity. The company describes the adapter as “any I/O.” But Brocade product marketing manager James. D. Myers doesn’t see many companies  implementing FCoE so far.

“There isn’t a lot of adoption yet,” Myers said. “They are buying a lot of converged networks but they are not turning (FCoE) on yet. There are a few early adoptors. Most are hedging their bets.  I think it will take upwards of a decade for FCoE to be prevalent.”

Brocade hasn’t been a huge advocate for FCoE the way its rival Cisco Systems has been. But at least one SNW attendee confirms Myers’ thoughts.  Mitchel Weinberger, IT manager for the Seattle-based GeoEngineers,  said he researched FCoE and found the performance gain wasn’t significant enough to introduce a new technology into his infrastucture. The company uses an iSCSI SAN from Compellent that connects 10 GbE switches to virtual servers.

“We don’t see the benefit,” Weinberger said. “All the studies I’ve seen say the benefits are minimal. We really didn’t see enough advantage to put Fibre Channel over Ethernet. It’s another technology for us to learn, and we don’t have the staff.”

FCoE basically encapsulates Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet networks, and the benefits includes the reduction of I/O adapters, cables and switches in the data center. But the convergence of Fibre Channel and Ethernet means storage and network administrators must share management responsibilities, or one team must cede control to the other. That can be a big problem in organizations where the two groups don’t get along.

“It makes total sense,” said Howard Marks, chief scientist at DeepStorage.net. “Except for the politics.”

The storage networking vendor updated its product platform to 16 Gbps Fibre Channel this week, including a switch that supports FC and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) ports to give it what QLogic calls “dual personalities.” QLogic also launched its 8300 Series Converged Network Adapter (CNA) that supports Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI, and the 2600 Series 16 Gbps FC HBA.

The Universal Access Point 5900 (UA5900) can be configured to run 16 Gbps Fibre Channel or 10 GbE traffic. Customers can start with 24 device ports and grow to 68 ports by adding licenses. Four of the ports can be used as 64 Gbps Fibre Channel trunking ports, and the switches can stack to 300 device ports. The UA5900 can be a Fibre Channel or Ethernet edge switch, and — with a Converged Networking license – it can serve as a top-of-rack FCoE switch to compete with Brocade’s 8000 and Cisco’s 5548UP devices.

QLogic also said it would bring out an intelligent storage router – called the iSR6200 – with support for Fibre Channel, FCoE and iSCSI. The router is designed for SAN-over-WAN connectivity.

The UA5900 and adapters are expected to ship through QLogic’s OEM and channel partners in early 2012, with the iSR6200 expected late next year.

QLogic was one of Cisco’s early allies in delivering FCoE gear years ago, and is on its third generation of converged networking devices. But FCoE has gained little adoption and Fibre Channel isn’t going away. QLogic execs say they expect Fibre Channel to remain strong while FCoE is a longer term item for many organizations. “We expect over the longer period, FCoE will gain momentum,” QLogic director of product marketing Craig Alesso said. “But Fibre Channel is still the workhorse for most enterprises.”

When FCoE does gain momentum, what role will hardware adapters play? Intel has launched software FCoE initiators that use host processing power and work with any network adapters. Intel’s plan is to eliminate the need for CNAs, but Alesso said QLogic’s adapters will have a big role in running FCoE. He maintains that CNAs are better suited for I/O processing and server CPUs should be used for applications.

“People can run FCoE initiators, but there’s a [performance] cost,” he said. “We free up servers to do what customers want to do with servers – run multiple virtual machines and multiple applications. The CPU should be used for running applications, not the I/O. We should run the I/O. Also, with [software] initiators, you lose management. You don’t have the common look and feel among management utilities.”

Symantec has done a lot lately to try and catch up to smaller rivals on virtual machine support for its backup products. Now it is ready to support virtualization in its storage management products, as well as data deduplication for primary data.

Symantec is preparing to give Storage Foundation its first major release of in five years. The main focus for the overdue upgrade will be support for mixed environments, which means virtual servers and the cloud as well as physical servers.

The Storage Foundation 6 launch will come in a month or two, but Symantec senior VP of storage management Anil Chakravarthy filled me in on a few details. He said the goal is to allow customers to run Storage Foundation in any operating system and on any hypervisor.

“We’re taking the existing products [in Storage Foundation suite] and orienting them to mixed environments,” he said. “Customers can mix and match the applications on a combination of platforms.”

Symantec is moving ApplicationHA into the Storage Foundation suite and that will also get an upgrade, along with Cluster File System and Veritas Operations Manager. ApplicationHA has been a standalone product until now.

Chakravarthy said Storage Foundation will enable primary dedupe at the file system level, and work with any NAS or SAN systems. He also claims Symantec will get more granularity than storage array vendors who have or are adding primary dedupe.

“We’ve had it in our backup products,” Chakravarthy said. “Now we’ve taken the dedupe engine and built it into the file system for primary data. Putting it at the file system level gives us granularity that you cannot have from deduping at the array level.”

One area that Symantec is staying out of for now is sub-LUN automated tiering. Storage Foundation already has what it calls Smart Tiering at the LUN level, but Chakravarthy said sub-LUN tiering is best handled at the array. …

One of the less publicized features in vSphere 5 is native support in ESX of Intel’s Open Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Naturally, Intel claims this support is a big deal.

Intel announced Open FCoE last January, claiming it will do for FCoE what software initiators did for iSCSI. That is, it will enable FCoE on standard NICs without additional hardware adapters. VMware vSphere 5 customers can use a standard 10-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) adapter for FCoE connectivity instead of a more costly Converged Network Adapter (CNA). Intel supports Open FCoE on its Ethernet Server Adapter X520 and 82599 10 Gb Ethernet Controller cards.

Intel’s approach to FCoE requires key partners to support its drivers. Windows and Linux operating systems support FCoE, but earlier versions of vSphere did not. Sunil Ahluwalia, senior producct line manager for Intel’s LAN Access Division, said vSphere 5 customers running Intel’s supported adapters don’t have to add specialized Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) to their networks. He said the concept is similar to Microsoft’s adding the iSCSI initiator to its stack in the early days of iSCSI, eliminating the need for TCP/IP offload engine (TOE) cards.

“We’ve seen that model be successful with iSCSI, and we’re taking the same steps now with FCoE,” he said. “Once you get it native in a kernel, it comes as a feature in the operating system and frees up the network card to be purely a network card.”

FCoE adoption has been slow, but Ahluwalia said he expects it to pick up after 10 GbE becomes dominant in networks. “Customers are looking at moving to 10-gig first,” he said. “As they roll out their next infrastructure to 10-gig and a unified network, FCoE and iSCSI will be additional benefits.” …

The primary data reduction landscape should start heating up soon. Besides Symantec adding primary dedupe to Storage Foundation, IBM and Dell are close to integrating dedupe and compression technologies they picked up through acquisitions last year.

A source from IBM said it will announce integration with Storwize compression on multiple IBM storage systems this fall, and Dell is planning to do the same with its Ocarina deduplication technology over the coming months.

In a recent interview with SearchStorage.com and Storage magazine editors, Dell storage VP Darren Thomas said Dell products using Ocarina’s dedupe technology will start showing up late this year with more coming in 2012.

“We’ve been integrating Ocarina,” he said. “It will start appearing in multiple places. You’ll see a [product] drop this year and more than likely a couple more next year.”
…

Sneak peaks of EMC’s Project Lightning server-side PCIe flash cache product showed up in several EMC-hosted VMWorld sessions. The product appeared in demos and tech previews, and EMC VP of VMware Strategic Alliance Chad Sakac said it will be in beta soon and scheduled for general availability by the end of the year. EMC first discussed Project Lightning at EMC World in May but gave no shipping date.

InfiniBand providers claim their value proposition is the same as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) — the ability to combine multiple types of network traffic over one wide pipe. But according to Brian Sparks, senior director of marketing communications at Mellanox and co-chair of the IBTA’s Marketing Working Group, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE, pronounced “Rocky”) can theoretically be run over DCE alongside Fibre Channel traffic. “With priority flow control in DCE, you can do both, but it’s up to the NIC provider,” Sparks said.

Sparks said Mellanox is planning to release products that support RoCE, and that other members of the IBTA manufacturers including Broadcom, Intel and Chelsio, may be working on 10-gigE NICs that support RoCE as well. The IBTA envisions RoCE finding use cases in financial services companies or businesses with a similar reliance on databases and low tolerance for latency.

IBTA is also hoping this spec will fare better than its last attempt to drive RDMA into the Ethernet world, a spec for RDMA over 1 Gigabit Ethernet iSCSI links called iSER, known in its Intel incarnation as iWARP. “It’s had a hard time getting market adoption, since the adapters are a little high on the power side,” Sparks said. “They require a slightly more expensive NIC and maybe only get a microsecond or two latency benefit.”

RoCE will be different, Sparks said, because latency is much improved over 10-Gig networks, and DCE will do away with the need to offload TCP/IP traffic, one of the hindrances to better performance with iWARP.

Emulex said the OneConnect adapters it first talked about in February are available for partners to ship, and IBM has agreed to OEM its 10-GigE NIC and 16 Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs with the Power Systems server platform.

Emulex is taking a different path than its main rival QLogic, which already has several partners selling its single-chip 8100 Series CNAs. Emulex is releasing its 10-GigE adapter first with TCP/IP and TCP Chimney support, and hopes to deploy a pay-as-you-go strategy where customers will later upgrade with iSCSI and FCoE connectivity. Emulex gets its 10-GigE silicon through an OEM deal with ServerEngines.

Emulex is counting on 10-GigE and Intel’s Nehalem servers driving convergence, with storage connectivity to follow.

“We’ve taken an Ethernet approach rather than a storage-centric approach,” Emulex VP of corporate marketing Shaun Walsh told StorageSoup. He says the Emulex approach lets customers pay for only 10-GigE first, instead of having to pay for FC connectivity they might not use yet.

“Every NIC card has the potential to be an FCoE card,” Emulex CEO Jim McCluney said during his analyst day presentation.

Emulex customer Lars Linden, SVP of data center services for Royal Bank of Scotland, spoke at the analyst day to express his eagerness for a converged network. Linden said convergence will eventually help him simplify management, reduce cables and increase utilization, adding that it can’t arrive soon enough for him. He says he RBS spends about $500,000 a year on cabling.

“I have people on staff who do nothing but cabling all day long,” he said. “They’re very clever people and I would like to have them do higher value activity, but this is table stakes for running a data center. As soon as there is a commercially available set of capabilities and technologies supporting convergence, there will be a rapid adoption.”

Linden compared the eventual move to consolidated networks to virtualization as a “game changer” technology.

Nobody expects 16-gig FC any time soon, despite Emulex’s touted design win. Emulex executives acknowledged the market moved to 8-gig FC much slower than it went from 2-gig to 4-gig FC so there’s no hurry to push out 16-gig products.

“This is a future announcement,” McCluney said. “We’re not going to see any 16-gig revenue for quite some time.”

The suspicion here is that Emulex and IBM announced the 16-gig FC design win to end speculation that QLogic might replace Emulex FC HBAs on the Power Series after securing a CNA OEM win with IBM last week. Emulex is IBM’s exclusive partner for 4-gig and 8-gig HBAs on the Power Series.

“We believe investors may have questions regarding QLogic’s recent announcement that its FCoE CNAs had been qualified within IBM’s System p (Unix) server platforms given that Emulex has long been the sole-source provider of FC HBAs into these IBM server platforms,” Stifel Nicolaus Equity Research analyst Aaron Rakers wrote in a note to clients after the Emulex analyst day.