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It had to happen sooner or later, but Brocade? I would have lost the farm on that bet. In retrospect I'm not sure why I was so surprised - the logic is sort of obvious - but I just never saw it coming.
I think that I, like most, stopped thinking about it. Emulex and Q-Logic have shared a spectacular 50-50 share of a flat HBA market - each at about 70% gross margins, for a long, long time. Both companies have printed cash by fighting over a point of market share here and there - but neither dumb enough to screw up a perfectly good thing by bombing price. They both knew their component portion of the OEM sale was so insignificant, as long as they were good citizens they could ride along under the radar.
I can paint a picture where Brocade steals a big chunk of share - first by forcing price cuts (which the others will very begrudgingly have to match), then by leveraging the fact that they are higher in the value chain since they own a lot of the switch footprint. In theory, they could give away the HBA's and make it up in switch margin, thus destroying a perfectly nice little market. I doubt they would do that, they have a chance to be able to change the game by adding intelligence at multiple points - the way Emulex would also like too - but having the switch as a core engine gives Brocade a leg up.
I can also paint a picture where not much changes except for Emulex and Q's stock prices. Q has a broader business base on the component side, and Emulex hedges with its InSpeed stuff, but HBA's and the fat, juicy margins that came with them have been both their bread and butter plays. One can't help but think this will cause some concern.
You have to hand it to them, they don't back down from giants like Cisco, have withstood a huge distraction with a stock option fiasco, surprised everyone by acquiring their then biggest competitor, and now are going to try to screw up a long established market. It would not surprise me to see CEO Mike Klayko wearing a Curt Schilling like "Why Not Us?" tee-shirt while mowing the lawn.
First power became an IT hot button - and now HBA's? What's next - super model backup services?
This "Since You Asked" article is about the outrageous growth rates of digital content and other fun stuff. At the end of it, I was speaking of libraries which reminded me of a recent shindig in Vegas that I attended with my lovely wife and a few other ESG'ers for a library fund raiser. For some unknown reason (place sarcasm here), my noble and supremely patient editor, Lucas, elected not to include that part.
Therefore, I add it here.
Speaking of libraries, I had an interesting weekend recently. I was invited (actually, my checkbook was invited, I was just baggage) to attend a charity fund raiser in the great city of Las Vegas, by ESG's own Taya Wyss - who is one of those people who hangs around with professional football players for some reason. Taya's pal, a big giant person (literally - a lineman for the NY Giants) Grey Ruegemer has adopted a bunch of public libraries in Vegas (yes, they apparently do have actual libraries in Vegas - who knew?) and held a Bowling fund raiser at a way off the beaten path hotel - The Suncoast. Being one who loves Vegas in small doses and a huge football fan, I happily agreed to be a sponsor. I paid for Tony Dorsett to bowl with the west coast ESG squad, but he didn’t show (don’t worry, I stole his gift bag). Fellow gigantic human Marco Rivera – a 3 time pro-bowl guard -became our teammate. I have significantly more in common with his lovely wife, who is roughly 210 pounds lighter than Marco, and just an awful bowler. Bowling is hard. Even without drinking, I had to really focus on not hurting myself or someone else. My wife, of course, was brilliant at it. She even looked like she knew what she was doing. I just tried not to fall down.
There were all sorts of giants hanging out bowling that weekend, lowering the average age of this particular hotels’ occupants to around 80. I looked like a six year old standing next to these guys. I had trouble holding a 12 lb. bowling ball which looked like a ping pong ball in their hands. I did wear Joe Andruzzi’s super bowl rings, and almost couldn’t lift my arm up. Joe, Grey, and Matt Chatham were all former Pats, all with rings, and all OK in my book. Nice people, those giants, though Joe A. did push me in the pool, and Marco did comment on the abundance of “fur” on my CFO’s torso. I told them to watch it since my lawyer was bigger than theirs. I don’t think I intimidated them.
FYI, they have actual penny slots at the Suncoast, which is apparently why their average slot player is approaching 115 years of age. How you make money on a penny slot machine is beyond me, but what do I know? I bet they have an exabyte of pennies - and cigarette butts.
If you would like to bowl with giants next year, or be a good egg and send some dough to this cause, you can do so at www.ruegysreaders.com/
Does anyone else smile when they think about about TSA losing it's employee's private data? It only included name, date of birth, social security number, payroll information, bank account, and routing numbers - which is a super added bonus and really makes stealing those identities a breeze. I guess I shouldn't be happy about it, even though I swear those folks go out of their way to make sure my airport security experience is as painful, unorganized, and annoying as possible. A public cavity probe in the middle of the Mall of America would have been more appropriate. The fact that our own government is stupid enough to allow non-encrypted data of such magnitude to even exist, let alone float around willy nilly, is astounding. So much for hoping for legislation to make people use common sense.
Iron Mountain quietly bought the assets of startup Avalere, who had some pretty big and interesting plans in the area of data categorization and classification. Those ideas turned out to be much bigger than their funding source, however.
Don't be surprised to see all the big guys enter the service provider market, either directly or indirectly, within the next year. From Microsoft to EMC, it will happen.
Maybe the coolest gizmo I've ever seen in storage is the new Drobo box from Data Robotics. I am not supposed to talk about it yet, but if it lives up to what I've seen in the first 24 hours, there will be a lot to tell.
I'm tired. Tuesday of this week I acted half my age and went with some pals to see Elvis Costello at a small venue in Boston. I love Elvis, and he was great as usual. I drank a bit, and got home a bit late, only to face the awful truth of 6:30AM, at which point I had to go back to Boston to catch a flight to Chicago to give a pitch at Storage Decisions (which again was stocked to the gills with storage folks). It will be interesting to hear the feedback, as I have limited recollection of even being on stage. I had to sprint out of there to catch my return flight, which in Chicago means you sit in traffic for an hour or so. I made the plane by 9 minutes. Good for me? Au contraire. After about 8 years of being either Platinum or Executive Platinum on American (which gives you the right to pay more money to upgrade your seat to a barely tolerable state), I didn't fly enough last year. You would think I had personally offended the CEO's wife by how fast they downgraded me to "slug" status. I still have dozens of "upgrades", which I paid for, that I apparently no longer have the right to use. Better yet, the plane was mobbed, and a very nice 400 plus pound woman occupied the seat next to me, and most of mine - but we left on time. Then we promptly sat on the tarmac for 3 hours. I got home at 2AM, only to arise at 6:30 again - this time because my 3-year old daughter decided that's was a good time to tell me that her brother called her a name. I haven't recovered.
I've been playing with Media Center in Vista for about 5 months - and am waiting on AMD to ship the cable cards they have been promising for a year or so to build my mongo centralized home media center. I may end up spending 20 grand to save one hundred bucks a month from the cable company, but I will figure this out. Between AMD and Microsoft, it can be an infuriating experience. Once I master it I'll either publish a best practice - or I'll fund a company to make this stuff actually work. I can't be the only idiot who wants to control my own home content distribution system. Joost is going to be way cool, fyi.
Cheers
First let me state that those are words I barely understand, and until recently have never even used the word "supplicant", correctly or otherwise. Having said that, kudos to Jon Oltsik for seeing a wrong in the world of IT and doing something about it. It turns out that some big guys bought some little guys and because of that, other big guys were about to have to create their own proprietary ways to provide basic security connectivity features for their edge products. No one really cared about giving a few bucks to Funk software (bought by Juniper) or to Meetinghouse (bought by Cisco), or using Microsoft's implementation when it was all but free, and really, who cares about Funk or Meetinghouse? When Cisco buys one and then Juniper the other, the picture changes. Since other big guys don't want to A: pay competitors and B: support the competitive cause, the only way around ending up with another batch of confusing, proprietary IT problems was to get everyone on board with an open source standard. There is no value in having a proprietary way to connect to something, but there are a ton of potential problems with having to do so.
Here are some FAQ's from their site - www.openseaalliance.org
What work is the alliance undertaking?
The initial effort will be to support the development of a robust open-source 802.1X supplicant.
What is 802.1X?
802.1X is an IEEE standard providing port authentication in LANs. It has since been used extensively in 802.11 wireless security and is a part of WPA. It is increasingly seeing use in wired Ethernet environments as well. The 802.1X specification provides an authentication framework enabling endpoint devices to be authenticated by a central authentication service. The 802.1X specification uses the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) for exchanging messages as part of the authentication process.
What is an 802.1X supplicant?
An 802.1X supplicant acts as the client side of a client/server authentication handshake. When an 802.1X supplicant tries to access a network, it is challenged for authentication credentials by an 802.1X authenticator (typically an Ethernet switch or Wireless Access Point). The supplicant and authenticator then exchange authentication credentials over a particular type of EAP (i.e. PEAP, EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS). When the supplicant provides authentication credentials, the authenticator forward them on to an authentication server via the RADIUS protocol for verification. If the authentication credentials are valid, the authentication server sends an “accepted” message to the authenticator which then grants network access to the supplicant.
The 802.1X standard has not been widely implemented in wired networks. Why is this?
Like many early standards, 802.1X has had a number of issues with standards implementation, product stability, and lack of user knowledge. As a result, 802.1X implementation is most often associated with wireless network implementation and has not gained a lot of traction in wired LAN environments.
The OpenSEA Alliance believes that it can act as an industry change agent to help overcome these early problems while advancing the technology. The OpenSEA Alliance can help stabilize 802.1X by developing and promoting a robust and widely available open source client. The OpenSEA Alliance also intends to champion 802.1X by becoming a champion for technology advancement and user education.
Is OpenSEA developing an open source 802.1X supplicant from scratch?
No. The initial source code for the project will rely heavily on the existing open-source Xsupplicant from the Open1X Project. The OpenSEA Alliance believes that its preliminary tasks for Open1X’s Xsupplicant include supporting WindowsXP, developing an easy-to-use GUI, and adding an API for extensibility. Following this extension of functionality, a robust testing effort will be the priority to enable Xsupplicant to become the “Firefox” of 802.1X clients.
Are there commercially available 802.1X supplicants?
Yes. The 3 largest providers of commercially available supplicants are Cisco (who acquired the technology from Meetinghouse), Juniper (who acquired the technology from Funk Software) and Microsoft. OpenSEA hopes to further 802.1X adoption by providing the market with an open-source alternative to these commercial offerings.
Oltsik came up with the idea, baked the program, and by using his brains and market muscle got a bunch of folks to belly up. I'm willing to bet that you will see the rest of the players fall into line with this program chop chop. Monday, the OpenSEA Alliance was announced in order to create an open source standard for "secure edge access" - and doesn't that seem like a dandy idea? Watch how many folks join the bandwagon by next weeks Interop show.
This is not the last open source standards initiative ESG will be driving. There are other areas we are exploring where we can help wrangle the cats for the common good of all. We need standard ways of doing the same things that don't add real value, but without standards can cause real problems. I'm hoping we have our next initiative announced in the infrastructure virtualization world in short order.
Nice work, Jonny.
This is a recent article I wrote somewhere.
We’re hung up on an outdated computing model that makes everything tougher.
We’re at one of those rare, very powerful inflection points in our crazy storage universe that’s so big it can’t be ignored, but came so slowly that nobody seemed to notice it until now.
For 50 years in commercial computing, dynamic, transactional data is what moved computing out of science labs and into the commercial world. Trillions of dollars have been spent trying to harness the power of that data and provide the infrastructure to create, store, protect, move and manipulate that information. The problem is that most data isn’t transactional anymore; a huge portion of the issues in storage and throughout our infrastructure are caused by us trying to use the same systems, architectures and methodologies we’re used to for data that has new requirements.
Commercial computing was built on the application of technology to support business causes—to create competitive advantages by enabling users to work more efficiently. That led to greater profitability and faster decision-making based on having more data analysis. The competitive advantage eroded when everyone had computers, and went from being strategic to being tactical and defensive. The game became about how many transactions you could support concurrently, and the value of each transaction minus the cost of performing those transactions equaled the “hard dollar” profit.
The industry built big iron that cost a ton, but it didn’t matter because it was easy to articulate cost vs. profit. Companies spent the next 35 years trying to outdo each other with the number of transactions they could process. Distributed computing lowered capital costs and raised operating costs, and things became more nebulous. EMC convinced users that storage was as important as the server, creating a new market that it has since dominated. Other vendors have come along, but most offer cheaper or better mousetraps still designed to deal with the fundamental transactional nature of data.
Commercial computing was dominated by folks who built the right stuff at the right time and sold it most effectively. IBM mainframes are still the transactional systems of choice. Oracle is still the dominant DBMS. EMC is still the core storage device. Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems cashed in on the rush to distributed computing. Smaller servers meant smaller decentralized storage, opening the door to the likes of Network Appliance, which created and continues to dominate the file-serving world created by the distributed computing evolution. Everyone and their brother came out with a block array for the “open” world.
What that means is that we now find ourselves with massive amounts of things. The number of devices we have to manage in complex networks rivals the human nervous system. And it’s compounded by our applying the same basic operational and technological constructs to this world as we did with the monolithic systems of old.
Industry used a new market wave by dumbing down and cheapening the heavy-duty stuff you’d already bought. They took systems built for transactional business, ripped stuff out to make them cheaper and then sold them as the answer for the “new world.”
We now have 100 times the specialization we did in the centralized world because we have 1,000 times the amount of things to know. We do this because we haven’t noticed that we’re solving the wrong problems the wrong way … and if we don’t stop, it’s going to kill us. Next month, I’ll explain the right problem, which will get you looking for the right answers.
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