 back to San Francisco next year, but we are here live with Rob Crawford, VP of sales at Q-Logic. Q-Logic, very interesting company, focused on sort of the glue between the storage and the systems, and we're here with Rob. Rob, welcome to theCUBE. Great, thanks Dave, nice to see you here. Thanks for coming on, so let's see, this is I think our 100th VM world in a row, but the ecosystem keeps growing, it's just amazing the impact that virtualization has had, particularly on your business, on IO, it's really transforming it, talk about that a little bit, and how so. Yeah, I think what we've seen, and we do a lot of customer end user knowledge collection, and one of the things we've seen is that of virtual environments, 80% of them are using a shared storage fiber channel environment, which is actually a higher percentage than I might have guessed. I think what you see is that with a lot of the features in VMware where you're sharing resources, you're sharing storage, it enables further extensions of the VMware capabilities, like the high availability capabilities, if you're set up with an ESX server that fails for some reason in a shared storage environment, that failover is seamless to the shared storage. So yeah, this 80%, that's interesting, I didn't know the number was that high, I knew it was high, because if you have any kind of mission critical application, you're going to put it on a fiber channel device, and I know a lot of end users, and we talk to them and say, look, I love iSCSI, I love all this other stuff, but certain applications, I'm sticking with FC, and FC is really your business, isn't it? It is, and I think if you look at our history and the fiber channel space, one of the things that people come to us for is the fact that we've got a proven fiber channel stack, it's an environment people are used to, they're comfortable with, they have confidence in, and that's one of our key differentiators in the market is that we understand that part of the market better than anybody. Why is it so hard to build a hardened fiber channel stack? I mean, it's probably more of a technical question, but you're in the business and let's face it, it's a technical sale, so why is it so difficult, and why are you guys so good at it? I think one of the most valuable things you're trying to build up over time is confidence in your fiber channel stack, and that only really comes with usage cycles, with end user customers, and years of experience, troubleshooting, improving, troubleshooting, improving, and that kind of bulletproof fiber channel stack that we've established in the market is based on our history, it's 15 long years of working with it, we've got a lot of history and a lot of experience and expertise in the company. So we know you do that well, but the sand is under fire, right? Yeah. It's been around, it's done before what now, more than a decade, driven great value, but a lot of customers are talking about, hey, we're doing scale out, we're using low cost commodity disk, those trends got to be on your radar screen, what do they mean to you, and how does Q-Logic respond to that? Yeah, I think largely what we're seeing is converged networking as being a trend that we're in front of, and we've been a very strong participant in, what you see with converged networking is that it doesn't matter if you're using, you know, iSCSI storage, if you're using fiber channel storage, if you're using FCOE as your protocol, you've got the ability to converge that traffic into a common network fabric, and that's really where we try to, you know, build a strong value proposition today. You know, obviously our fiber channel products are very strong, but as people move to Ethernet, 10 gig Ethernet, they want to use FCOE, they want to look at iSCSI, they want to look at, you know, in just regular network traffic in that same environment, so, you know, the obligation grows beyond fiber channel for us in terms of what we're bringing to the market, converged networking, we're a leader in that part of the market today, basically it's ways you can use 10 gig Ethernet to, you know, work with more of the data center traffic that you want to work with. Do you guys, do you see customers actually beginning to consolidate onto a single pipe, or are they more consolidating onto a single technology and still separating their land and their sand traffic? I think one of the big things we see from customers is a requirement for flexibility. You've got some customers that want to try and converge everything, they want to simplify their networks, converge their traffic, you've got some customers that want to keep it separate, you've got some that want to migrate over time, you've got some that want to, you know, maybe have remote sites that are in different environments than centralized sites. So I think flexibility is probably one of the main things we're focused on and making sure that we, you know, continue to bring products to the market that enable flexibility for customers. Basically, if they, you know, migrate their environment using latest technology, 10 gig Ethernet, and migrating, you know, the way that they're moving their data over time, we're able to accommodate a good, you know, flexible solution there. So how about InfiniBand? It's a topic that comes up a lot. It's an area that, you know, I've said actually I think it's an opportunity for QLogic. I think frankly you guys over the last couple of years could have maybe even done a better job in InfiniBand. And I think you've really started to focus on that. You're seeing a lot more server to server communication, you know, the high speed, low latency activity, obviously HPC, but increasingly more commercial applications. What are you guys doing in InfiniBand? What are the customers telling you and what are you delivering? So InfiniBand's an interesting part of the market and I think one of the things you're seeing is that being implemented in broader use cases, used to be HPC was kind of a focus point for the InfiniBand market. We've got a very strong presence in HPC. Recent customer wins you may have heard about this year at places like Trial Labs that are doing large deployments. Very differentiated strong solutions from QLogic in that space. But I think what you're seeing is underneath that there's a core low latency capability of InfiniBand that is applicable for a variety of markets. You see it a lot now in financial markets, you see a lot in terms of the way people are building their vertical stacks around storage. So InfiniBand's a part of the market that we're excited about. We think we've got a very compelling solution there. You know, we continue to work on, you know, the roadmap and improvements. We're kind of the number two in that space. You know, there's another guy that's got more market share than we do. But we feel like there's a lot of opportunities for us to still be a strong player in that space. I'm a Red Sox fan. We were number two for a long time. And now it's working out okay, baby. So I wanted to ask you, you had a management transition, I guess it was about a year ago, a little less than a year ago. HK, your previous CEO, chairman, visionary, unbelievable individual really saw the future and made some big bets. You know, people thought QLogic was crazy, you know, five, seven years ago. You know, going after it the way you did and putting everything into silicon. That obviously paid off. And now you've got Simon running the business, CFO. That's right. What's that transition been like? How do you preserve that vision and still the execution ethos? What are your thoughts on it? I think one of the main things is it hasn't really been a light switch in all honesty. So HK's got strong heritage, obviously with the company, you know, the company was built around him largely. And he's still in the office every day. Really? So I see him on a regular basis. He and Simon are very much in lockstep. I think it's looked at being a phased, you know, transition over time. I think Simon's an interesting guy. I've come to know him, you know, better in the recent months. You know, from a CFO, you don't expect a guy to have a lot of technical background. He understands our technology as well as a lot of our guys on the technical team. So he's got a lot of breadth and he's got a lot of, you know, vision for where he wants to take the company. I think we're seeing a gradual transition from HK. I think what you'll see is a consistent vision for QLogic moving forward. I don't see it's going to change course a lot. So Rob, what are you guys doing here at the show? Talk a little bit about, I mean, meeting with customers, but I mean, what's the big themes that QLogic is seeing? Yeah, we are. I mean, you know, there's some things that we have in technology that are pretty compelling for virtualized environments. One of the big things we're pushing a lot today is the VM Flex capabilities we have basically allows partitioning of a NIC to, you know, to take it, let's say a 10 gig adapter and break that into multiple partitions. In a virtualized environment, that's really helpful because you're using a shared IO path and it allows you to have dedicated IO for specific applications if you want that. Gives you a lot of flexibility for configuring your network. Also gives you a lot of, you know, benefits in terms of just simplifying the number of slots, the number of ports, the number of cables. So the converged networking, one of the challenges of converging your networking is that you're converging your IO and by offering NIC level partitioning, which is something that's unique to QLogic, we're able to allow the administrators to kind of define how they want to manage their IO path, where they want dedicated bandwidth to be available, those kinds of things. It's a great capability and it works really well in a virtualized environment. Yeah, I mean, we've seen, it's interesting. I mean, we've seen just an explosion in everything, right? Processor prices come down, virtualization is consolidating, everybody said, oh, Intel's in big trouble and I think they're selling more CPUs than they've ever sold before because we live in an elastic market and we're seeing IO go through the roof with a combination of Moore's law and now multi-cores and virtualization. You have this multiplicative effect and customers aren't just going to say, okay, let's just go buy more ports and more cards from QLogic, are they? You've got to be smarter about the way you manage that but you're a sales guy, are you afraid you're going to sell less? I mean, have you seen that in the market? Are you seeing this elasticity that I'm positing as the case? No, I think what you see is that data growth continues at a pretty astonishing rate. I think everybody's predicted it forever but it continues to exceed expectations, I think. Basically, we need fat pipes to get data moved around. It's as important in a cloud environment as it is in a data center, as it is in a desktop. That requirement to be able to move data quickly and across fat pipes is something that we're on top of, it's the core of our business. I think one of the things that's interesting, one of the trends you see in the industry right now is that you've got a lot of consolidation in the storage space. Some of the little guys that were startups were a little disruptive. A lot of those companies are now part of bigger companies. HP, 3par, left-hand, you look at Dell and the compelling acquisition and equal logic. So what you end up with is that those large Tier 1 OEMs have multiple storage protocols that they're trying to support. They're building environments around that and being able to operate between those different protocols on a common network is one of the big requirements we're seeing out there. It's a place where we really exceed because we've got great fiber channel technology but also the converging networking to bring in the other pieces. How about your switch business? I've always thought of Q-Logic as the switch for techies. Like my friend Eugene Hakopians who's at Caltech. He uses the Q-Logic switch as part of a block that he uses to build an archive where they basically are documenting the universe. Pretty intense project. And he's pretty techy though. But last year, a year before, I can't remember exactly, I think it was last year, yeah. You guys began to expand into more commercial markets, broaden your brand beyond just sort of a card supplier. You want to deal at HP and some other deals. Give us an update on the switch business. How's that going? I think number one, we need to be clear about where we compete and where we don't. In the switch market, we're at the edge, largely with the switches that we sell under our brand. And I think what we do is we offer a differentiated solution, the stackability, the scalability of our solutions is different and it offers a pretty cost disruptive and flexible solution for companies to build off of. So we feel like we've got a great solution in the switch space. It's an interesting part of the market. If you look at storage as a whole, we own a lot of the host side of the storage market through our adapter technology. We also, a lot of people don't know, we own a lot of the target side as well. So a lot of the tier one storage players that are out there, they're using Q-Logic technology as their target for how they connect into the fabric. And it's really logical for us to be the centerpiece with our switch as well, because then you end up with an end-end fabric story from host to switch to target. So host to CNA to the switch to the target. Yeah, okay, good. End vision that you guys have talked about for a while. All right, Rob, well listen, we're out of time. I appreciate you coming on inside the cube. Great to see you again. I appreciate your time. Good luck with everything.