 Hi, this is Stu Miniman of Wikibon and we're here with Silicon Angle at SNW here in the heart of Silicon Valley. Joining me today is Jay Metz and talking a little bit about what's going on the show and specifically, you know, technologies that, there are some technologies that help us to kind of use what I have better and others that really help us innovate and really drive to kind of the next step of how we're going to gain more efficiencies from what I'm doing, really transform the way that technologies are. In one of these technologies there's a whole track at SNW called Convergence and specifically Jay and I are very familiar with Fiber Channel over Ethernet. So, you know, Jay, at SNW, you know, we've been talking about Convergence for a few years now. Most people know how to spell FCOE and so how's the attendance on these things? You know, what's beyond the kind of one-on-one level and what do you see in here at the show? Well, it's natural as technology starts to develop you're going to see some of the more sophisticated questions and answering coming up and fortunately with the sessions going on at SNW you're finding more and more of the presentations gearing towards the next step. So, we've had FCOE and Convergence at the access layer but now we're starting to get the questions as well what happens if I move beyond the access layer? What kind of benefits should I expect to get? And questions also relating to how do our teams start to work together because after all you are working in an organization and you need to know how the other side is working. So Jay, I believe I've read on your blog a term that it's called the SLAM administrator. Is that something you've trademarked? No, I haven't trademarked it, it's open for publication. Can you tell us a little bit about what the SLAM administrator is? It's more of a concept. The SLAM admin is a storage and local area management administrator. Basically it's a team member that works together as a holistic functionary for the data center as a whole. And as a result you maintain the same kinds of functions within that team but you have a broader sense of consequence. And as a result a SLAM team will work together to look at the data center as a whole rather than the segmented portions that we normally find. So if I understand right that's really about the convergence of, you're saying it's the storage and LAN networking teams. So I wonder at a higher level your thoughts about, virtualization has really changed a lot of management. So much can really be managed by that central virtualization administrator. Everything can be plugged into like vCenter if we're talking about VMware and it's really changing the roles of the entire IT team. Any thoughts on that? Well it really is one of those things where this is a process, it's not a quick fix. There's nothing that you can do as a LAN team member or a SAN team member or a server virtualization team member that is independent of what's going on. It's the interconnectedness of the organization that becomes paramount and every member of a data center team, of a SLAM team needs to be able to understand what those consequences are. And so every change in a data center has a ripple effect especially in a converged and consolidated network. So Jay let me ask you, you're saying I can't just throw out my entire data center, put everything in the cloud and I'll have no operations expenses anymore? I love your rhetorical questions, yes Stuart that's exactly what I'm saying. Okay, awesome, thanks Jay. So let's talk a little bit about what's near and dear to our heart with Fiber Channel over Ethernet, FCOE. Starting to get questions and people are saying, we've been talking about it for a while. There are deployments that we're starting to hear of but is it just slow for adoption to pick up or is this the general progression takes a while? We always think that Wikibon, we posted for FCOE that it's usually more of an S-curve, it takes a little bit longer than people think to kind of ramp things up and then you'll usually hit a knee of the curve and things will just explode. And so are we near that knee? I think we are, I think that one of the things that triggers the upsurge of adoption is the more choices that you have, the more flexibility that you have in terms of being able to deploy it on your own terms. And as recently as last week you had a major milestone of director class multi-hop FCOE being introduced into the industry which allows customers the options to be able to figure out how to plan their data center in the future. And that is a lot of the key trigger points that our customers have been telling us that they wanted to see happen first. Okay, so Wikibon, we covered the release last year and we definitely think multi-hop is a good step forward. I guess where I would challenge is if you walk around these halls and you talk to the storage administrators, they are all very reticent to change. They will go kicking and screaming and say the way that I've done things is the way that I want to keep doing them. And it's not until there's a forcing function. And where I think Cisco is doing a good job here is FCOE doesn't have to be the driver for these technologies. When I buy now a Cisco Nexus 7000, FCOE, you can activate it in that device. It's not that I have to say, oh, I'm buying this device for FCOE. I buy it now, I let my LAN team roll out 10 gigabit, make it the platform that I'm doing it. And then later when the storage administrator says, hey, I'm going to go buy a new device to do fiber channel. The CEO can be like, wait, can I just activate the software license? And can't you just use it inside there? And the storage administrator is going to say, wait, I can build the same core edge topology, isolate all my traffic, and make it even AB sand isolation, and make it look exactly like storage. And it's just built on ethernet. That's when they're going to have a forcing function. You want to write my blogs for me? Well, but the great thing here is that you have choice without being forced to choose. And that is one of the key things about the technology that you and I are very familiar with, with fiber channel over ethernet, you have the ability to bolt on the technology into your existing data center with no loss of functionality or the loss of your legacy equipment, and legacy is used very loosely. But you also be able to capitalize on the roadmap of ethernet with the 40 and 100 gig that will allow you to future proof the data center. But at the same time, you can determine what kind of implementation you want to have without being forced to choose one over the other. If you want to use iSCSI and the applications that you have, you still have that capability. You're not forced. It's a false dichotomy. Well, we're right. Not only is it not about FCE and about ethernet, but really, I believe we're seeing that fiber channel in ethernet are becoming a single, not mutually exclusive technology. So what HP announced last year with the Flex ports and what the Cisco now has with the unified ports are switch ports that can be either fiber channel or ethernet. So it's now not, oh, do I buy 8 gig now and is there going to be 16 gig? You buy a port now on the switch that can be 8 gig fiber channel or 10 gig ethernet in the future, 16 gig fiber channel, 32 gig fiber channel, 40 gigabit ethernet. And we're going to be able to switch between these protocols. And I think that's one of the things that's also really important to remember is that we are working on developing both technologies, both fiber channel and ethernet technologies are well under development. And as a result, that gives customers the comfort to know that whatever choice they have, there's a future in it. No technology is dead. We're not giving up on fiber channel. We're not giving up on ethernet, which somebody asked me yesterday, which was a really weird question to ask. But the idea is that as these standards and as these technologies continue to develop, we're continuing to add new features. We're continuing to add new functionality. And those unified ports are just one of the many things that are coming down the pike. As I heard someone said, this isn't quite Bob Metcalf's ethernet anymore, but it's maturing and moving forward. So later tomorrow, I'll be hosting a session. Unfortunately, it conflicts with your session because I'd like to hear your session. But I'm going to be sitting down with a customer, actually, who's deployed convergence. And I think that's pretty interesting. So some of the stats I've heard from Cisco is, people say, is this technology rolling out? Over a third of all Nexus 5000 switches have had FCOE in them. Rough back of the napkin, there's over 10,000 Nexus 5000s. So we're over 3,000 FCOE customers just on the Nexus. Plus, every UCS has it embedded. HP and IBM Blade servers have it embedded. Any customer stories you can share for us? A couple, actually. I mean, we've got two in particular that are particularly of note. One is the University of Arizona, which has deployed FCOE at the access layer to tremendous amounts of savings in their CAPEX and OPEX for being able to reduce their power and cooling supplies on campus. And Amaviva TSF in Italy has deployed FCOE at the access layer and is also looking to deploy it on a multi-hop basis beyond the access layer and has been having tremendous success as a result of deploying conversion networks. And they're very excited about moving forward. You know, one of the things that's pretty interesting is that I was responsible, I am responsible for the early field trials of multi-hop FCOE. And one of the key things that people have not actually yet come to realize, and I hope that they will now, is that when you have an early field trial, we give them a boilerplate topology to build up. And then they knock it down and then they build up their own topologies to test. Right. One of the things that they were really excited about was that it only took a matter of minutes to reconfigure because they didn't have to recable anything. There was no new physical connections that they had to make. All they had to do was reconfigure based upon the switches that they had involved and it saved them days, even weeks. So when you're saying that moving from fiber channel, moving to ethernet, the optical cables, this is what we're talking about or I'm not sure I quite follow? The cabling was irrelevant. We use both copper cables as well as optical cables. But the actual topologies themselves, the amount of hops that you had from a fiber channel perspective was simply a matter of, not to mention the bandwidth allocation as well, but simply a matter of reconverging. Right, and as we said, that's really fiber channel and ethernet, looking the same, can configure them the same, looks and acts the same. And management's starting to progress a little further. So, to try to make that kind of orchestration of the entire land and sand together as there. And you're bringing up management, which is an excellent point and that the management tools that go along with these technologies are becoming very sophisticated in being able to continue to have the team's familiar tools available to them without interfering and that's critical. I mean, you're talking about the conservative nature of storage. Well, they want to be able to have their storage network under their control so that they can continue to be responsible and reliable for providing those services. And with the management tools that are coming out for multi-op FCOE in particular, you've got that ability to have roll-based access controls with a single pane of glass that allows your network to remain segmented logically and be managed logically without interference from anyone else. So, great, Jay, this is Stu Miniman. I'm here with Jay Metz of Cisco, talking at SNW. So, I'm at Stu on Twitter and you can find us at wikibon.org. W-I-K-I-B-O-N.org and wikibon.org.org.cifblog. Jay, where can we find your information? My Twitter handle is jmichel-m-i-c-h-e-l Metz-m-e-t-z. I know it's a long handle. What can I say? Jay Metz was taken. So, or you can just find me at cisco.com, I guess. Logs.sysco.com actually. All right, thank you so much for joining us and look forward to hearing more from you at SNW. Thanks, Jay. Thanks for the time.