 Hi, this is Dave Vellante. We're back live Silicon Angles continuous coverage here. We're at storage networking world SNW We're here with Rob Davis CTO of QLogic. Welcome Rob. Thank you very much. Thanks. Yeah, it's good to have you Again, you were in the Cube at Oracle open world, right? Yeah last summer. Yeah, that was good good event Packed packed house. Well, we're here at the Santa Clara Convention Center a new venue for SNW usually Usually this time of year. What are we in Orlando or Orlando or Dallas or Phoenix? Maybe they used to have me the first time I've ever been to an SNW in the old days in Silicon Valley Seems like a good good place to have it, right? I mean, it's you know, relatively convenient for you guys I'm from Minnesota. So anywhere there's no it's good for me. Yeah, you don't live in Minnesota now. I do you do Oh nice. Okay. How's it going out there? Are you the ice melted yet starting to Still have about you ice fish. I have not I thought you had to if you're Minnesota resident They raise your taxes So we're going to talk a little bit about convergence and And FCOE you got you got a panel tomorrow kick butt advancements and an FCOE and fiber channel and fiber channel as well Oh, I guess it's kick butt enhancements and fiber channel and FCOE. Okay, cool So so is fiber channel and FCOE kicking butt? They are they're in our product lines anyway We're you know shipping more fiber channel ports than we ever have and we're shipping more FCOE ports than we ever have Why do you think that is what are the drivers? Well, it's different So for fiber channel the driver is that it's the storage technology of choice in the enterprise data center You know, it's tried and true in there for years and continues to evolve from through the different speeds with FCOE But FCOE it's all about convergence You know data centers are getting to be very complicated places with all different kinds of new protocols ice guzzies was a storage protocol that came a couple years ago now FCOE and Convergence allows you to put Both the fiber channel sand and the ethernet land into one port coming out of your server Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about that You know, I've said that that FCOE is inevitable even though a lot of the users that I talked to you They're not ready and I want to touch it, you know, they're not it's not a user poll type of thing It happens slowly in storage. Yeah, they really do. Well, especially because you know, you don't want to lose data and You know, data is a very important thing and if it's working why You lose a couple emails, you know life goes on reconfigure things. No big deal You know the whole business can grind to a halt. Yeah, and people get get fired or worse Absolutely, you know where I grew up they break your legs for that kind of stuff No, so so so it but it really seems to be More of a technology driven a vendor driven Initiative as opposed to a user poll and we were talking off camera about some of the drivers for that, right? I think there's the drivers for convergence just from the simplicity standpoint, you know But I think that in like blade servers There's a real pole and we're seeing a lot of early success in the blade server space because you've got You know a server that has a backplane with these different networks on it And if they can get one of those networks out like pull the fiber channel out and put it over ethernet with FCOE They can reduce the cost Heat the power the cooling, you know and the server vendors are really pushing you hard for this, right? Absolutely Yeah, so because they're out of real estate. They're dealing with heat density problems Right, they're at the max and it comes out of the blade server as a fiber channel port So we have a product that's based on the bullet ASIC and and so that that provides you Conversion from FCOE to fiber channel so as it comes out of the blade server, it's still pure fiber channel Yeah, okay. So so let's paint a picture for the audience here So so traditionally you've got a a land card You know adapter in the server and you've got a fiber channel adapter coming out of the server You've probably got a redundant pair of those right. Yep. Go into separate networks. Absolutely, right? And so that's taken up more real estate. Yep And and you might even have a 10 giggy, you know, especially nowadays, right? You know For some high-speed stuff and so the the real estate on there is really packed especially in a blade server, right? So in a stand-up server, those are cards that go into the PCI slots But in a blade server, they're special mezzanine cards and you know They'd much rather use that space on the processor blade for more Intel processors than for IO. Yeah, right So okay, and so so so converge network adapters come in you guys announced. What did you announce? Oh boy, I think our first one was it probably three years ago. Maybe more. You're in Gen three now Yeah, we just in the cadence of every run on our third 12 months or so. Yeah, we're in Gen third gen You guys are you ahead of the game there? You the leader? Oh, well, we think we are, you know Deloro seems to think we are we're at least yeah She does a good job Tim Deloro sort of the the leader in in tracking that market, isn't she one of them? I say she I mean it's her company, right? And she's the CEO of the company, but they do a good job. So Okay, so you're on your third generation now that that's CNA essentially brings Fiber channel and ethernet together and fcoe is the key technology a key technology there, right? So it's ten it's ten giggy. Yeah, and it's fiber channel in a single card, right? Right, so think about two adapter cards plugged into your server one ethernet one ten gig ethernet one a gig fiber channel You put them together and you have a cna So it's one card that supports both fiber channel protocols over fcoe and ten gig ethernet land protocols Over ethernet so now instead of two redundant connections coming out of the server. I got one Yeah, go into say for instance the top of the rack switch Yeah, okay, and I presume the cna technologies are migrating into the top of the rack switch as well Well, that's where our bullet ASIC from our switching product line comes into play And that goes into top of rack switches or blade server switches Which is the same thing embedded in a blade server and it converts from the fcoe that's running the inside the ethernet to back to fiber channel or Regular ethernet depending on what and now that traditionally again went out to two separate switches And it'll go from the top of rack to the end of the existing sand in the data center or into the existing Ethernet now Cisco just had an announcement I think it was last week even where they announced some high-end switches. Yep. We're end-to-end Fiber channel over ethernet seven thousand. Yeah, and and and ten gigi So it seems like the IT audience is one day gonna wake up and all these All these capabilities gonna be there and it's just gonna be well one as we'll use them because it's gonna cut our cost in half It's gonna lower our heat Dense, I guess our heat output right and it's gonna cut our cost So I mean it's kind of the way this thing's gonna go We're putting convergence across our product line whether it's our adapters that we talked about or switches that we talked about or even our Storage routers which allow you to connect all the different Technologies whether it's fcoe or ice because your fiber channel together From the perspective of moving or migrating data from different arrays So today most of the arrays are either fiber channel or ice cousin But when you put in an ice cousin array to cut costs you need to still move the data From the fiber channel and that's what our data migration router products How about this concept of virtual IO you hear a lot of people talk about that and From the perspective of a virtual operating system. Well, virtualizing the IO essentially right so Let's say a VMware environment and your your your IO Going through the roof right I was permit bird are going crazy and and instead of having physical IO You can now share that that that resource and abstract it And we have a utilization of IO and we have a lot of features We call it converged flag or converged the VM which goes into our adapters which allows the virtual operating system to offload some of those functions and Does that convergence in the adapter hardware instead of in the virtual operating system? You know CPU cycles much is pretty interesting company. How long you've been there? I've been there since the acquisition of anchor back in 2000 Okay, so you saw the whole Transition and the well an anchor used to do adapters and fiber channel switches back when fiber channel wasn't even a full spec yet So you guys make some pretty big bets back then didn't you what was? We involved in that or you were you I was involved from the selling side, you know I was selling ancored ecologic not yeah, okay Ecologic side, but then you guys decided to sort of sort of bet on FC and bet on sort of You know integration at that time We had parallel scuzzy products and we bet on the transition of parallel scuzzy if anybody can remember that that was yeah, sure That's right. We bet on that moving from From parallel scuzzy to fiber channel which used to be you know the parallel version of scuzzy before sass came on And a lot of people thought you were crazy doing that didn't they perhaps didn't have I mean Scott McGill used to say if everybody everybody agrees with your strategy you're in deep shit That's well So that was some of you know you guys made some some bold calls and it's kind of paid off Hasn't it I mean you guys done done pretty well It seems like we ended up you know us and and Amy likes ended up as the two You know finalists if you will in the fiber channel world on the adapters. That's a good business I mean you guys make good margins on that business and I'm on the technical side, but that's what they tell me No, it's all public information It's easy to see but but but you've also Changed the company a little bit from just a pure Supplier of cards or adapters Acquisition of Angkor and then more recently We brought in infiniband technology with two acquisitions and then Most recently we brought in ethernet adapter technology with the acquisition of net zen. I want to talk about That's another thing we're talking about land on motherboard. You know, that's an interesting topic. What's let's start there What do you see in there? Well your Analogy where sooner or later the whole data center gets converted over to these new switches that can handle FCOE like the new Cisco 7000 you know, it'll take a while, but eventually the data center will migrate to those with if you couple LOM technology on top of that land on motherboard technology and you Can imagine that we're putting those FCOE CNA kind of technologies into those LOMs Pretty soon. We've got the whole data center converted over and the LOM ports on your servers already support it You can see where the move to FCOE could be accelerated rather quickly, right? Right? And now of course the you got some ethernet guys Well that was one of the things sharpening their knives to jump into this space I got you got you got Broadcom and then of course Intel right saying a it's all gonna go ethernet You know, what do you think about that? well When they say it all all is gonna go ethernet, I think we agree that right and ate us right it's all you but You know, we're still shipping more fiber channel ports every month than we did the month before so I think you know There's different tools for different tasks, and I think people that want to focus on the highest performance most reliable You know today. That's probably fiber channel in in the future whether FCOE ethernet can take that over, you know, I think Well, so we've talked about how it these transitions take a long time FCE to FCOE and then that's hardened isn't it? Why why is it so hard for people to have a Hardened fiber channel stack not a lot of guys do right who is it's basically you guys emulex Okay, I mean, yeah, you know, it's it just is a lot of In fiber channel, it's not like ethernet where there's millions of ports and it's there's Probably tens of thousands of people that understand it in a lot of detail in the fiber channel world that's probably thousands of people instead and The customers are much more demanding like we talked before about you know losing an email versus losing the data set right company and so There's also a lot of companies building products that have idiosyncrasies in them and over the years that fiber channel stack It's hardened all those idiosyncrasies you know, you've got like Subsystems from EMC and a touchy and net app and HP and all of them do things a little bit differently And you have to know and have worked through all the problems with all those subsystems And that's just a few of them. You know, there's probably a hundred different subsystem just a lot of permutations and and and a Limited skill set of people know how to solve those and then there's the drivers and all the different operating systems and the idiosyncrasies There then there's the switches and interoperability issues that are well known and what percent of what percent of those people live in Southern, California and are locked inside The key logic building well an amulet That's right. You guys how your stones throw apart right so and then the other thing I wanted to talk about was infinibands, right? I mean that's sort of an interesting area right Larry Ellison's made a lot of noise with Larry Ellison loves infiniband Right, I mean he's jamming it into the exadata and exologic and he's taken a big chunk of Melanox And it fits into it fits into storage in a couple of different ways So you mentioned the exadata and but there's also the pure The true scale which is the product that IBM has which is just yeah, right data, right? And then there's Isilon who clusters their nas heads with infini man actually net app uses infini man to cluster there They're so high-speed clustering server-to-server communications very low latency exactly and that's where it fits into storage More as an internal technology. There are a couple of companies that make actual native infiniband ports I think DDOT DDN does yeah, and maybe a genio, which is now net app But infinibands really designed for high-performance compute, you know the HPC environment the Lawrence little more labs the the geothermal or the geo oil hunting, you know applications crash simulations at like The automobile makers the simulations of drugs what's what's going on now in HPC is because of the immense Availability of CPU cycles are basically free right from Intel with all the cores You can now build one big computer with a lot of small computers for a very low cost using infiniband to connect the memories together Yeah, so so you obviously it's an HPC, but it's going more mainstream I mean you mentioned I salon right there. They're starting to penetrate, you know traditional markets like insurance and financial services But you have to remember that it's built inside the iceland box It's not like in finna band comes out in the same with exadata. It's inside the Oracle box, so it's very good at connecting processors together You know processor memories and applications running across multiple processors, and that's what it's designed for like fiber channels Very good at connecting storage to servers Yeah, so so what's going on with Q logic in in finna band? You know that seems to be to me anyway an area that that is a great opportunity for you guys And you haven't made a lot of noise there Historically anyway, is that is that changing? I mean is that on your strategic radar? Is this the year of Q logic in finna band? I think it you know this is a SNW right so this is a storage show if you were at super computer show last year you would have seen you know our booth which is As big as this whole area and yeah, love HPC verbiage and messaging and we had a Scientist from Lawrence Livermore lab giving a big presentation, so it just depends on the venue But I mean it just it seems like every market There's there's there's room for two right in Melanox is obviously done very well within finna band But now with Ellison taken what I think a 10% share of Melanox if if I'm an Oracle competitor, I'm not so comfortable with that I think that's a great trend for Q logic and I have you guys been able to capitalize on it So the pure scale product has us in it. Yeah, okay, so you're gonna hear first So it just sort of depends on on the OEM. Yeah, yeah, okay, I think we see it as a market similar to Fiber channel from the perspective is in the end there were two players You know us and emulix on the adapter side and we see the HPC market is now You know with Voltaire being acquired by Melanox. It's now a two player. That's right I mean essentially Voltaire was Melanox, right? I mean it was but it wasn't one company. They weren't they were they were the systems They bought Melanox chips and they built systems out of them. Yeah, okay, so there's considerable value add there Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, okay, so now it's down to two now. It's down to do you like your chances You know, I think if you look at history, we were way behind Emulix when we started that race so Yeah, so you're predicting similar things for in finna band I'm just saying that we have a good chance. I think you do too. All right, we're Rob Davis CTO of Q logic. We're talking convergence. We're talking in finna band land on motherboard. We're at SNW Tomorrow kick butt advancements in fiber channel and fiber channel over ethernet Rob. Thanks very much for coming on the cube Thank you. It's great to see it. Thanks. See you around