Guest Column: Spring Is In The Air And New Products Are Being Launched Everywhere

By Jim McCluney, CEO of Emulex

This year has been particularly active, with OEMs delivering a surge of new servers based on Intel's new Xeon 5500 series processors (previously codenamed Nehalem), traditional networking players, such as Cisco, branching out into the server space and murmurs of new alliances that may be formed as the industry consolidates.

Last spring, Emulex and others unveiled the first generation of a new category of connectivity products, Converged Network Adapters (CNAs). These solutions were all relatively similar and characterized by multiple chips that allowed Fibre Channel traffic to be carried over IP networks. CNAs propelled a new phase of consolidation for the data center through network convergence. We have seen companies move from tower servers to racks and from racks to blades. Virtualization has also been helping IT achieve even higher levels of utilization and consolidation.