A Note from AJ, or Where’s the Beef?

With the rush that always seems to arrive with the holidays, and after taking some time off, December blew by. Then, at the first of the year, I moved into a new job with a group that integrates solutions for our customers; so I haven’t been blogging much for a couple months.

Today, I got a note from a friend of mine, AJ. AJ spends a lot of his time talking with customers all over the world. He has a great vantage point from which to gauge the interest in emerging technologies by customers and their level of deployment. He brought up an interesting observation about converged networks.

Here’s AJ’s note.

Brook,

I was thinking about this morning’s executive briefing with one of our larger customers and figured you would appreciate my train of thought. Of course we talked about technology adoption trends and as we were chatting, I was reminded of another major IT trend not so long ago, datacenter consolidation.

As you know, this was a hot topic for many customers presenting some real challenges for IT architects and operations folks. As you will recall, a few years ago the folks at HP collapsed 84 large regional datacenters into 6 large scale production environments. Those environments are some of the most scalable, hardened operations that I have ever seen; including things like more than 250,000 ports of our SAN Fabric. When HP had those datacenters on line, they made them the showcase to hundreds of key customers along with a basic message, something along the lines of-

“Come and see how HP re-engineered its own IT organizations and see the benefits of what we can re-engineer for you!”

All in all a VERY compelling story.

But here we are at the beginning of 2012, and depending upon your calendar, we are 3-4 years into the Converged Network “revolution”. And I hear from many customers words to the effect:

“Such and such networking company, OEM or storage company says that Converged Networking (specifically FCoE) is standardized, certified for prime time, infinitely scalable, production ready and the cost savings are so amazing that as soon as you deploy it money will be falling from the equipment racks to be swept from the floor.”

Now, I can’t help wondering why we haven’t seen one or more of the networking, storage or server companies complete the reengineering of their own datacenters with converged networks. If they had done that, wouldn’t they heavily market their success using their own datacenters as a showcase? Wouldn’t that be a compelling proof point of being “ready for production”? I’d expect we would hear something like:

“Come and see how we converged our datacenter networks and re-engineered our environments to simplify deployment, ease management, massively scale, provide the base of the private cloud and cut our capital and operational expenses by half. We did it for our datacenters and we can do it for yours.”

Perhaps it’s just that I don’t get invited to such events. But I’m interested in what people have seen. Has anybody seen a completely re-architected, scalable, mission critical production environment showcased by any of these companies as proof that converged networks using FCoE are “the way to go”?

Personally, I suspect that this will be more like the early years of server virtualization where the virtualization platforms actually offered a service where they would audit the application base and tell you what applications you could safely stack for virtualization. But it just seems like this time much of the industry is asking the customer to figure out where the sharp edges and corners are on the new technology; perhaps losing some of their own blood on the datacenter floor in the process.

I don’t think it’s too cynical to believe that if even half of the market hype were true, we would have seen at least one converged networking datacenter being a showcase from one of the major players by now. Does anybody have any “confirmed sightings” like this?

Ciao,

aj

After I got AJ’s note, I saw a summary of internet posts of interest by Greg Ferro with a link to this post by Steve Foskett, Eight Unresolved Questions About FCoE – @SFoskett – Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat. Steve identifies a number of restrictions that maybe the reason AJ isn’t seeing as strong an endorsement of FCoE as one would expect of a mature technology.

So, to borrow a 1980’s marketing campaign slogan from a well know fast food company, “Where’s the beef?”