Emulex Corp. 2012 Prediction - The Year of 10GbE
A Contributed Article by Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing, Emulex Corporation
2012 will mark an inflection point for the industry, as more IT organizations realize the need for high-speed, high-capacity networking to support virtualized workloads, large data transfers and newly converged storage and data networks, giving rise to the following trends:
- The year of 10GbE: 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) adoption is on the rise, and enterprises are seeking high-bandwidth interfaces to support virtualization and cloud computing efforts. In fact, some analysts are predicting that the 10GbE market will expand more than 50 percent annually during the next four years, primarily driven by LAN on Motherboards (LOMs), mezzanine cards on blade servers, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) and 10GbE Network Interface Cards (NICs). With new Intel Romley - based servers due to debut in the Spring, we'll see vendors like HP, IBM and others offer a new class of servers equipped with 10GbE modular or chip-down LOMs as standard fare.
- Hadoop takes off: While Hadoop is emerging as a popular framework to support cloud computing demands, it is also being adopted by enterprise IT departments as they seek new ways to manage and mine big data across increasingly complex networks. In fact, IDC predicts that the growth of total data in the storage universe will skyrocket to more than 8 zettabytes by 20151. With 2012 poised to be a year where enterprises solidify their next generation infrastructure strategy, there will be an increasing need in Hadoop systems to process more data in less time, putting strain on current configurations. Of course, this need will drive the evolution toward 10GbE networks, and the need for 10GbE network adapters for assured performance.
- End-to-end management becomes crucial - As enterprises evolve beyond virtualization to cloud computing, resulting (frequently hybrid) IT infrastructures will require end-to-end management to monitor and control resulting data. 2012 will bring a new generation of server, storage and network management solutions, including I/O availability and performance management, which can see from one end of the cloud to the other. This will enable developers, carriers and IT managers to provide access to server, storage and networking resources locally, and remotely, acting as one integrated pool, which is required to support mobile and virtual computing in ways that we did not have just five years ago.
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Shaun Walsh is the vice president of marketing at Emulex Corporation
¹Source:
IDC: IDC Predictions 2012: Competing for 2020 (#231720, December 2011)