Dinosaurs Like Cisco Need "Mammals" In The Data Center

(MoneyWatch)  Cisco, EMC and Dell have done such a good job of filling data centers with their servers and storage devices that in order to keep growing in new markets, they've either got to disrupt their own installed bases or expand into adjacent ones. For the time being at least, these dinosaurs have chosen the latter option, pushing a new vision of the data center they're calling "convergence."

Being a dinosaur isn't all bad--after all, those reptiles ruled the planet for 165 million years -- but today's Serversauruses also realize they're in a symbiotic relationship with small, furry mammals that facilitate their ambitions.

John Webster, principal IT advisor at boutique analyst firm Illuminata, told me that Cisco CEO John Chambers has been "making personal phone calls to enterprise CIOs, spinning the data center vision." EMC has been promoting a similar vision; its CTO, Chuck Hollis, has expended a lot of energy touting convergence on his well-read blog.

The name of the game in convergence is creating products for the data center that promise customers savings in power and physical footprint by enabling servers and storage devices to share processing tasks and to communicate more efficiently.

But storage devices use fiber channel for input/output (I/O) processing, and servers use IP. They require different kinds of cabling and use incompatible communications protocols, which poses a challenge for anyone seeking to create "convergence" in the data center.

Enter the mammals. Deep in the bowels of the data center, connectivity tools called host bus adapters (HBAs) provide physical connectivity between servers and storage devices and theoretically help improve server performance.

Emulex and Qlogic, the two dominant vendors in this space, have recently introduced HBAs with newly enhanced communications capabilities, like support for fiber channel over Ethernet (FCoE), providing a bridge from one protocol to the other. This development could be key to helping the dinosaurs (again, no disrespect intended) realize their convergence ambitions.

Rick Villars, an analyst with market research firm IDC, told me the market for HBAs is approximately $1 billion, shared about equally between Emulex and Qlogic. Though relatively small, the market is enticing enough for a third vendor, Brocade, to announce that it too will begin producing HBAs that support FCoE.

This week, Emulex unveiled a series of new software and management consoles to make its HBA more compelling to its partners. Steve Daheb, Emulex's CMO, must have uttered the phrase "converged environment" at least a dozen times in the space of a fifteen minute presentation at the New York Stock Exchange that I was invited to attend.

The company's presentation also included heartwarming video testimonials by executives from Cisco, EMC, Dell, and VMware. More than Emulex, though, they seemed to be praising all the small furry mammals that make the furtherance of their ambitions possible.

The number of companies that are even experimenting with FCoE in their data centers at present is probably under twenty, Webster told me. But the vendors are getting busy positioning themselves for what they've convinced themselves is the next big opportunity in the enterprise data center.

The small furry mammals are following suit. "They've got to get in on that opportunity on the ground floor to survive," said Webster.