 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine, VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. Live in Las Vegas for EMC World, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, chair of my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're here live at EMC World with QLogic, Rob Davis, the CTO, Cube alumni. I've been on many times. Welcome back to the Cube. Thank you. So talk about what's going on with you guys right now. Ashley, with the company, and then what's going on at EMC World? Well, all kinds of changes at QLogic. We have a new CEO. We've acquired the assets of Broadcom's Ethernet business, or part of the assets, and we've acquired Brocade's HPA business. So lots of things going on. Yeah, so Rob, interesting times in the adapter business. I think when I joined Wikibon four years ago, it kind of talked about the horses on the track. On the Ethernet side, Intel and Broadcom, really own that one gigabit, laying on motherboard business. And on the fiber channel side, QLogic and Emulus had a good duopoly going. Fast forward, you just talked to QLogic, just picked up some really interesting assets. What do you see as the landscape on the server adapter marketplace? Sure, so let's start with the fiber channel side. I think you were forgetting that LSI and PMC were still in the business along with Brocade, so there were really five players in the fiber channel side. Yeah, well, some of them, there's a difference between the initiator and the target side, so. True, true, but LSI did have some business there, especially in the low end market. So what you see on the fiber channel side on the server is it's down to a two horse race, which is really good, we believe, for us, because we've always had a lead over Amulex in the market share space and the technology side, so we feel pretty good about that. And then on the Ethernet side, there's even more players. You have Chelsea, you have Intel, you have Brocade, I'm sorry, Brocade's Ethernet business that we took with their HBA business, and ourselves and Amulex, lots of different players and some smaller guys like Solar Clear and Melanops. So again, that business is now starting to consolidate with our carve out of the Broadcom technology. Yeah, so what do you see as the, kind of architectural discussion points that are having, what differentiates between them, things like really low latency networking on the Ethernet side, it seems to be one of the hot topics. Do we see a merging between the fiber channel and the Ethernet side, or do you expect that they really, from a chip set standpoint, an adapter set, or are they going to kind of live separately for a while? I think they're going to live separately for quite some time. Fiber channel has a very established market all the high end enterprises have used it for years. They're comfortable with it. Ethernet has a very established market from a different perspective as the basic connectivity. And so I think they're both going to live in particular areas for quite some time. All right, so Rob, the interesting kind of big announcement, one of the big announcements EMC made, they made an acquisition called DSSD, and well, most people don't know too much about the architecture. They're talking about really low latency, I mean sub microsecond designs. I know this is an area you've looked at, can you tell us, things like Rocky and RDMA Overconverged Ethernet, and Infiniband is doing, well what are you seeing in the marketplace that's going to drive this discussion for the next couple of years? Well I can tell you that they are using, they have a fiber channel interface on whatever they're doing. So that tells you that fiber channels, especially at the 16 gig, going to 32 gig, performance level is important to the flash space. They're also doing 40 gig Ethernet. So that tells you that high performance is needed for flash, whether it's, whatever the network technology happens to be underlying it. From a low latency perspective, fiber channel has always been a consistent latency store, high performance storage interface, and Ethernet is getting there with the technologies like Rocky that you mentioned. Yeah, it's a great, let's talk about fiber channel for a couple of minutes then, if I look at the announcement EMC world, one that kind of struck me is kind of interesting is the VNXE now has a fiber channel port on it, and in talking to some of the Clarion and some of the converged solutions like VSpec, they said that fiber channel is still really going strong, especially in Asia and in China, specifically they called out. I'm curious if you have any input as to why it seems to be so strong there, especially at the lower end of the market. Well we see the same thing. I think one of the main reasons is that tried and true technology. Ethernet is a great technology, really good for server connectivity, general purpose server connectivity, but when you're doing high performance storage sands, you definitely need a technology that you can count on that has a consistent latency and consistent high bandwidth. Ethernet with iSCSI, with FCOE, is definitely moving that direction. Lots of the low end in the US is iSCSI. In Asia, I think that it comes from the training that they get in our colleges, right? They come here, they learn about storage sands, fiber channel is what's taught, right? They look at what EMC is selling, they look at what NetApp is selling, and they're copiers, so they copy that fiber channel technology. So I'm curious to get your take. You look at what one of the big pushes EMC has is around their Viper and their software defined solution, and it seems to be flexibility to go between some of the block architectures and file an object. Do you see a movement that way? Do you think we could finally get to the point where we can embrace some of those solutions? Because when I talked to most technologists and you said, if I could choose what I want to do, object gives me so much more, and that would be great to go that way. Yeah, if you look at the data sets today, I mean object makes huge sense for a lot of the applications because it's right once, read many, right? That's what it's designed to do, and block technology is designed to be in databases, right? And that's why block technology needs fiber channel performance, and that's why object technology is very well suited for Ethernet, and we're excited about the growth in that part of the storage business because it fits into our Ethernet push and our new Ethernet technology from Broadcom. Okay, great, so you've pulled a bunch of different assets through the acquisitions. What does that mean to the portfolio of Q-Logic on the Ethernet side? Well, the first thing it does is it takes our 10 gigabit product line and it gives it the extension into the 40 gig and the 100 gig Ethernet space. So we acquired technology for the existing server market in the quad port 10 gig area, and we acquired technology for next generation in the 40 and 100 gigabit area. Okay, and what use case is, where are we with the adoption of 40 and 100 because price is always a challenge, powers and cabling still can be concerns on some of these solutions, so where are we seeing that take off or do you expect later this year to pick up? From the storage perspective, I think it's really waiting for the server to have the array vendors like EMC to add that port to their arrays and their appliances and that technology. We see on the fiber channel side that when there's a speed bump, an eight to 16 transition, for example, it isn't until the array vendors start providing the 16 gig ports that we see the new speeds take off. So I think that you'll see 40 gig with iSCSI and FCOE really take off as the array vendors start to provide it. All right, so you're saying the storage arrays won't pull in the tent and getting things to take off? Well, I think on the storage side, on the adapter side for regular servers, it's really bandwidth requirement, right? So you see most of the servers last year were still shipping with one gig, a high percentage. As the 10 gig becomes more long technology with this new Intel update, that'll probably start to become the norm is 10 gig over one gig and then 40 gig will start to come into the high performance apps. Right now, I think 10 gig is going to become sort of the norm going forward this year. All right, Rob, what can you update us on kind of the QLogic EMC relationship? What do you have going on this week? Where do you have interesting partnership opportunities? Well, with EMC, we're doing a lot of work with their different product lines, their different array product lines with our 16 gig, our target A6, and also we do work in some of their Ethernet appliance, you know, the appliances doing Ethernet. So quite a lot of connections between EMC and QLogic on the vendor provider side. Okay, I didn't know if you've had a chance to check out the show or, you know, what you were interested to get out of this week? Well, I'm interested in seeing what's going on in the flash space. I'm interested in seeing what's going on in the software-defined storage space. There's always, you know, the new releases, the new press releases coming out of EMC, gives you a glimpse into the future on the storage side. Rob, one of the things we've been talking about our last couple of events is like how the world's changing software-defined enterprises. Joe Tucci says we're trying to find data center. And Stu and I were just recently helping out the Red Hat Summit about the engines of innovation. And now everyone's building their own hot rods, using the car metaphor. So I want to ask you, what's your take as under the hood? The change is going on at the convergent infrastructure. The key things that people might not be aware if they're not in the trenches, the major trends that you see that are really instrumental in creating really these new power engines so that the souped up hot rods of the enterprise and the data center, what are they going to look like? What are those key trends that you see that are the ones that are being worked on right now the most? So we're really excited about this area because our technology is very, especially on the Ethernet side, is very modifiable to these hot rods so we can tune our engines, right? Typically in general purpose enterprise, your IO, whether it's a fiber channel adapter or an Ethernet adapter, has all the knobs set to medium, right? So the bandwidth is set to medium bandwidth, the latency set to medium. But if you know what the applications are like in some of the hot rods you're describing, if you need low latency, you can turn the knobs to low latency. If you need high bandwidth, you can turn the tuning knobs to high bandwidth. So we're pretty excited about that. So tuning is key, right? Well, also we think that there's areas for us to add value there. One of the things Prasad is working on is sort of a redefinition or a re-pumping new life into our product line through some of these new initiatives that you're talking about. As the DevOps culture kind of gets into the data center, you know guys who are kind of looking at that we don't really have room for failure. Manageability becomes a key part of it. How do you see the manageability piece coming into all this? We see the vendors asking us to add more visibility into the data flows going through our parts and categorizing them more. So we think that we're well positioned to provide that. What's the biggest thing that surprised you guys at Q-Logic in the past two years in terms of the mega trends? Were the things that you see or saw that you acted on or things that you looked at and said, hey, we could have rode that wave a little better? What was some of the highlights in the past two years? I think how quickly Flash took off was something that surprised us in many different ways. For one thing, it seemed to have rejuvenated Fiber Channel, the startups that were doing Flash, initially we were working with them and they all wanted 10 and 40 gig ethernet and then it seemed like they went out and talked to customers and they came back and they all needed 16 gig Fiber Channel and when were we going to have 32 ready? Put pressure on you guys. It did, but in a good way. So I think that surprised us. I think we thought that was going to be more of an ethernet space just because it was new and green field. How did all that stuff go down with Brocade and stuff and Broadcom? Take us through some of the play by play and why? Well, so I think that we had a switch business for many years, Fiber Channel switch business and when we decided to back out of that space, it made working with Brocade much easier and since we were the number one supplier of adapter Fiber Channel adapters and they were the number one supplier of Fiber Channel switches, it just made sense for us to figure out how to partnership and it's exciting because not only have we taken their technology on the adapter side and our product line, but they had some really neat features that they weren't able to market very well because of the size of their market share and now that we have that technology on our side, we're able to really do some neat things in the QOS and in the management of the data flows areas that you'll see in some future products. Yeah, so Rob it's been interesting after the move, Q-Logic getting out of the switches, Brocade getting out of the adapter side, we've actually seen a little bit of rallying around all the players that are involved in Fiber Channel to help with the messaging and things like Gen Six and just for the inside baseball, we've seen that some companies that I remember 10 years ago we're working to get, 10, 15 years ago working to get Fiber Channel off and into the environment are now working closer together. So you mentioned some of the features, do you think there's still innovation left in Fiber Channel? Definitely, I mean you see the 32 gig and the 128 gig speeds coming through the standards very quickly, I think the partnership with Brocade that we now have will help accelerate that because we can be more lockstep on our roadmaps instead of very secretive about them pre-announcements. I think that you see Amulex also joining us and you see big players like EMC, HP, some of the other big storage players on the Fiber Channel side also very involved. So, last question I have for you is, look at the really big players, the Googles, Facebooks and Amazons, what impact are they having on your business? Well, they aren't having an impact on our business directly, but they're having an impact on our customers business and that is definitely noticed, but on the other hand, they are new opportunities for us too. We see them as OEMs, right? They're just as big and by just as many build just as many servers now as an HP or a Dell, right? So, we see them as customers to innovate with and provide the interconnects that they need for their systems. And what's really interesting about those companies is take Facebook for example, they only run five apps I think in all their data centers and so if we go back to the tuning discussion we had earlier, you can now tune an entire data center to those five apps. Yeah, yeah, it's different, Facebook has five different configurations they do, Amazon on the other hand has dozens of configurations and expects to have more, so different philosophies but that's, but if you look at HP, they have thousands of different configurations, right? Because their customers can configure it any way they want and so you have to design your IO to be ready for whatever's thrown at it. In the old days, I'll say old days, couple of years ago, your OEM business was groove swing. Now you got open compute, you got Amazon, these guys purpose building their own stuff, you guys have been working with them as well. How much has the cycle of innovation accelerated things like open compute where there's now a tinkering maker culture out there? Does that change how you guys look at the market or has that impacted you yet? We're seeing some early signs of the tinkering around developers not just being the classic hardware geeks but now software. Has that hit you guys yet? Definitely we're, you know in OCP for example, we built an OCP adapter for that platform so we're involved with that quite a bit. We're looking at ways to accelerate the protocols on the OCP side and the OpenStack side similar to the way we accelerate the protocols of iSCSI and FCOE and FiberChannel on the internet side. So we see that as a definite engine of innovation and it's also driving innovation back on the FiberChannel side because it's creating competition of a different architecture. You know speeds and feeds are back but also it's going to be encapsulated away from the developers you see in the software models hit so it's also impacted the cloud because seeing huge expansion on data centers in Iowa for the big guys, the big players are massively scaling up and the enterprise won't hyperscale. You're seeing a lot of that going on. Absolutely. I think that the architecture of hyperscale is migrating to the enterprise. You guys are going to be in the consumer business I guess soon right, yeah? FiberChannel on my iPhone? I don't know, I think we'll keep. Obviously it's funny but. I think the hyperscale is definitely an Ethernet business and that's why we, you know, hyped up or I mean incorporated the Broadcom technology to really get our Ethernet. That shoe could drop any minute now. Did you worry about that at all? What do you mean? Volume increases, I need a zillion net afters. Well we've, I don't know if you've been following but we've been adding to our executive staff a lot of expertise on the Ethernet side on the hyperscale side and on the operation side to get ready for those. That gets too all happy because he's been writing about this for a while. He's smiling over there, yeah, I see it's coming back. Steve was right. Rob, really appreciate you coming into the Cube. Fantastic conversation and it's been great to chat with you here inside the Cube at EMC where I'll give you the final word. Tell the folks out there in your own words. Why is this point in time so different in the computer industry, in the technology industry than any other time in terms of the confluences of the mega trends? What's unique about this moment in time? Well I think you have two mega trends coming together at the same time. That's the cloud and flash. Flash is totally changing the way that a storage is being done because you no longer have to design your systems around the limitations of the moving parts of a disk drive. And cloud, you know cloud is really allowing a new revolution in the architecture. Not so much, I mean it's really a pendulum swing because back in the early days of timeshare everybody called up a mainframe computer and used a terminal to talk to it. Now our terminals have just turned into our phones and our tablets, but that architecture kind of went away for quite a few years and is back now and that's really exciting too. Great to have you on Q-Logic, powering the engine of innovation, big component, big part of the engine. Really appreciate your time Rob, David CTO of Q-Logic. We'll be right back here in the Cube after this short break.