 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibon.org. Back with SiliconANGLE TVs live continuous coverage from HP Discover 2013, Las Vegas. It's the third day of the show. A lot of people are either out watching Santana or that unfortunate loss in triple overtime of the Bruins to Chicago. So joining me for this segment is Cube alum and friend of the Cube, Rob Crawford, VPSL from CubeLogic, Rob, welcome back. Good, thanks, Stu, good to be back. Hey, so at the show, the attendance is about what it was last year. It's 11,000. Have to say the keynote this morning was a little bit lighter than expected. Some of it might be that people are out here with a reshift. Some people are leaving a little bit early on there. But good energy at the show. And I've been seeing CubeLogic's logo around. Not only your booth, right next to us is the Connect Worldwide Group. And they've got like the NASCAR CubeLogic logo on the back of the shirt. So what's CubeLogic's presence at the show? What are you guys doing? So we've got a big presence this year at the show as we always do. This is a big show for us and it is every year. HP, I think, as we've talked about before, is a big strategic business partner for us on a number of levels and continues to be. So we show up every year. We typically have a pretty good showing here and find it to be a great show, a great time to interface multiple HP and customers. Great, so actually, I think back to one of the things we talked about in the past is people don't often think of CubeLogic as a switch company. But they're switch architectures that's inside HP's components. And I heard Dave Donatelli talking about it. The flex fabric, the virtual connect, that is some of the innovation that HP's shown for some of their converged infrastructure built on CubeLogic technology. So the question I have for you is there was some recent workforce moves inside of CubeLogic and the word on the street is that had an effect on the switch group in CubeLogic. Can you give us the update as to what is CubeLogic's switch strategy in business? Yeah, so let's talk about our switch business in general first, because our switch business really is based on an embedded strategy. Most of our switch solutions are embedded with OEM partners in some ways. So in some cases that's an ASIC, in some cases it's a module, in some cases it's a box, but these are embedded solutions that we sell through our OEM partners. And as part of that, there typically is a high level of integration that we do with the management framework, everything else. So that's kind of the nature of that business. And I want to make sure that everybody understands we're still in the switch business, we're still committed to it. What was announced last week, which was a big announcement for us, was a restructuring. And so we, historically, we've had business units inside our company. The idea is that we're consolidating those units together, we're going to get better efficiencies, both engineering, test, development, road map, everything that we're doing, we found that we were a bit fragmented and a big move was made to restructure and consolidate those units together. Yeah, I wonder if you could speak. So in addition to that movement, there was the executive change, so Simon is no longer CEO, we've got an interim CEO in place. That's right. Talk to you guys a lot, you guys have your strategy in place, really pushing the market with your fabric, cash solution and flash. Should people be expecting that Q-Log is going to be making a pivot, changing to new markets, or is it strategy going forward? I think there's a bit of a view internally that this is a good time to double down on the business. And so we are in the process of recruiting a new CEO for the company, we're a new leader. And the focus is really to get somebody that's a very strong technology visionary, somebody that's got a strong technology vision for the company. A little different than where we had been, right? Because we feel like we're at a time when it's a good chance to double down. The company's financial health is phenomenal, we've got a lot of cash, we're in a good strong position, and we think it's a good time to push some of the emerging technologies that we've brought to market a little faster, a little further. And that's a big part of what we're focused on today. Yeah, that's great. I mean, I'm not the financial analyst, but I see profitability in the company. So guys thrown off cash, which is a good thing. Flash, huge discussion at all the shows I've been at recently. HP's got a good push here. Give us an update on QLogix position in the Flash marketplace. I'd like to know both from, you know, your new product that you brought to market as Bells. How does Flash impact the whole portfolio of QLogix? So it's a good question, right? So you see a lot of SSD and Flash technology throughout the storage infrastructure today. So you've got server-side solutions, things like Fusion I.O. and others. LSI has a solution there. You've got more network-based solutions or appliances that sit in the network. And then you've got the array-based solution, stuff that sits in the array. And there's really a place for all three, depending on the application and the environment that you're deploying. What we do is different than any of that, right? So we actually have a server-side solution. So we take a standard HBA. And this is, it's called Fabrikash, I believe. Fabrikash is the name of the technology. So really what we do is we take a regular HBA infrastructure and we add SSD capability or cash technology to that adapter. And so it's a cash-enabled adapter now. And there's kind of two reasons why we think that's pretty compelling. Number one, it's transparent in terms of how it fits in the infrastructure. So the driver that you use for a Fabrikash adapter is the same driver you use for standard Q-logic HBAs. So you've got a shared driver and that cash becomes transparent in the way that it's deployed to the server. So to the server, it looks like an HBA. To the array, it looks like an HBA. But you just, you get much better performance because you have the ability to cash data locally in the server close to the application where you get good acceleration. So that's number one, is this transparency thing. It goes in with a unified driver that you're used to using for your HBAs today. The second thing that's pretty cool about it is that because it sits in a fabric of a sand, so it sits as both a initiator and a target, it's able to participate in that sand. So using that fabric of the sand to share that cash between multiple servers. So we're able to cluster cash between servers using the sand fabric as the interconnect. And so you're able to actually build clusters and configure these things together so that they're aware of each other and they work in conjunction to accelerate clustered applications, which is something that's been a big challenge for server side SSD technologies today. Yeah, Rob, it's one of those. I wish we had a whiteboard here. I've actually seen the product. So if you look at it, you have that control point physically of where the host bus adapter really sits in the server. And you have that software that's reliable. It works with all of customers' applications today. And you're extending that capability so that it plugs into the sand. You guys aren't creating the sand. You're not becoming a flash vendor. You're still an IO controller that works and it then allows that kind of single board to become clustered with other servers really one of the top challenges that we've had of server-based flash. It's really interesting. The other thing I want to talk about 16 gigabit fiber channel. I'm actually starting to see now end-to-end 16 gig available. Dell announced that they now have the compelling with the 16 gig on their storage array. Actually uses QLogix chip, is my understanding. They do. And we had, I can't remember the product line, but it's the MSA product line here from HP. Now it's 16 gig. Bring yourself to speed. Where is 16 gig adoption? Products are out there. People are actually using it. I heard something about the price of the optics is still kind of high. It is. And I think like any of these, there's kind of, if you look at fiber channel business, the speed bumps, just like in any technology, you hit the speed bumps along the way. And these speed bumps involve a transition. So we went from four to eight. You learn lessons about how customers deploy that. And there's really a lot of variables. You've got a lot of infrastructure beyond just the HBA and the server. You got switch technology. You've got the target side on the arrays. All of this infrastructure needs to evolve kind of in conjunction. So typically what you'll see is, you know, a little slow uptake and then it ramps quickly. And then you'll see it, you know, maintain that ramp through the rest. But usually it's a three, four year cycle to go from one to another. Based on the change in the infrastructure. So we're seeing 16 gigs start to hit that up, upward part of that transition curve now. We're seeing good adoption. We've got 16 gig solutions that are now actively in place with all the major OEMs, HP kind of leading the way on that. We see very, very high adoption of QLogic technology on the target side. We've had very, very good success working with virtually every major storage player today because a lot of what we do with converged technology gives them the ability to have multi-protocol access with a single ASIC going into an array. So it's been very popular on that side. So what we see is that, you know, we're kind of hitting that uphill part of the ramp right now. We're it's transitioning faster. We look at take rates and, you know, I think as we go through this, the rest of this calendar year, we're going to see that continue to accelerate. Yeah, I guess one of the nuance that I at least heard from some of the field people is that even when the switches and the boards and the adapters are going in, a lot of times that's going to be an eight gig optic that's going in there. That's right. Because it's still a little bit cheaper. While you might have infrastructure that supports 16 gig, the amount of customers that are actually running at 16 gig speeds aren't there. And of course it's a, you know, the bottleneck in the system, the cost of the whole solution, it's a complex environment. So a lot of, you know, you phase in a deployment and a lot of people future-proof their architecture so that they can migrate there quickly, you know, with the transition of optics or something else when they get there. I think one of the things that's interesting about the fiber channel business, and we're obviously, you know, that's our big part of our business. We keep a very close eye on fiber channel is that, you know, one of the things that's exciting about fabric cash, not to run back to that, but is that that's a step forward that's not just a speed bump, right? This is something that's really innovative that we're doing inside the fiber channel fabric that's going to improve performance and it's not just a technical speed bump, it's kind of changing the paradigm of what you can do inside that fabric. All of a sudden I have the ability to actually use that fabric for things other than just transmitting storage data. We're actually using it for clustering. We're using really east-west traffic within switches, which currently doesn't get used a lot in the architectures today, to kind of optimize the whole use bandwidth of the fabric that's being deployed. So we think that this is, you know, that there's multiple things that are moving forward on the fiber channel technology front. The use of cash, the ability to use cash on a server side is just one of those incremental technology innovations that we think is going to be important. Okay, so Rob, I'm sure you're meeting with a bunch of HP executives and maybe you've talked to some customers here. Any kind of success stories you can tell me about either how you're going to market or customer deployments that are doing something cool that you're hearing about at the show? Yeah, we're seeing a lot of interesting things happen right now and I think what's happening in the market is that there were different thoughts about how the market was going to evolve two years ago. I think, did, you know. Which market specifically? FCOE, things like that, right? So you look at convergence as a market and I think as an industry we looked at it as happening a certain way. We're actually seeing it evolve in a different way, probably. It's not that FCOE is not important but it's participation in a typical storage fabric may be different than what we thought it was going to be a few years ago. And so, you know, I think one of the things that's really important right now is this idea of flexibility in the architecture. It's one of the things that we've adopted and really been advocates for is this converged infrastructure is not about one protocol versus another. It's about flexibility. It's about being able to support multi protocols within an environment, multiple, you know, different types of fabrics and interconnect and making all that work together and come together. And that's typically what we see as being the real benefit of the technology we bring to market. Yeah, Rob, you know, I totally agree. Most customers that I talk to are not interested in the protocol wars anymore. Hopefully we've gotten beyond that. One of the things Q-Logic was helping to try to drive is some of that convergence between, you know, so if it's fiber channel or if it's Ethernet, you know, there's solutions that can pull together. How real is that today? And you know, how does that fit? Especially HP was one of the leaders in driving that, not necessarily FCOE, which they have, but you know, Ethernet or fiber channel, most of their products have, you know, both in there and there's some flexibility there. And I think what you see a lot is that it's not that people aren't utilizing FCOE. It's they're using it in a portion of their fabric, right? So what we see is a lot of FCOE inside the rack. If I'm going from rack servers up to a top of rack switch, FCOE's a nice way to do that because I can do it with a converged, you know, single converged networking adapter in each of the servers. And then you take FCOE and you transition to fiber channel from there into the rest of the director fabric of your storage infrastructure. So we're seeing, you know, pockets of this that are taken off and doing really well. And so I think people look at FCOE and say, gee, we don't see it on the storage side as much, but you may see it within a rack. And that's every bit of it. So FCOE aside, what about the, you know, flexibility that you've got, you know, chipsets and products that can be either just fiber channel or any ethernet, not necessarily FCOE. You know, that's kind of the flexibility we were talking about, right? So being able to manage multiple protocols with a single ASIC is a really big deal. And that's, you know, that's one of the things that we've seen as a big attractor to the technology we're bringing to market today. It's one of the things that we have a lot of traction with HP on as an example. You know, a lot of the things that they're doing in terms of, you know, innovating and offering flexibility to customers is based on the technology we bring to the table. Well, Rob Crawford, I always appreciate you coming to join us here in theCUBE. Stu Miniman with Wikibon, here with Silicon Angles. Continuous coverage from HP Discover. Day three, going strong until at least 4.30. So we'll be right back after this brief break. So let's go. Thanks.