back to article SOLD: Emulex – for 34% less than shareholders were offered 6 years ago

Data networking outfit Emulex, harried by activist investor Elliott Management, has given up its independence and shopped itself to Avago Technologies for $606m in cash – $8/share – giving execs and investors a nice windfall. As well as Emulex, Avago also acquires the firm's mainstay Fibre Channel HBA business, its nascent …

  1. asdf

    inept management

    >Endace is a different story. Bought a couple of years ago as part of an attempt to rekindle growth, Emulex had hoped it would contribute $40m/year to its revenue, but it is doing a tenth of that.

    Looks like they paid 130 million for it as well. Granted not anywhere near the scale of Autonomy but looks like just as bad a purchase and lack of due diligence from management.

  2. Alan Brown Silver badge

    Ahem

    "Fibre Channel is not really growing but is a classic cash cow, with the 8Gbit/s to 16Gbit/s transition under way and a 32Gbit/s changeover coming – with predictable upgrade and OEM business in prospect."

    The current generation of FC we have installed is highly likely to be the last thanks to switched SAS networks and we're not exactly unique in this.

    FC is becoming more and more niche, which means more and more expensive. Even Brocade has paid attention to the writing on the wall and diversified.

  3. joejones

    FC will be around for a long time to come, but I can't imagine anyone starting with a blank slate for a storage environment would pick it over NFS or iscsi. We use FC mostly because we already have it, and its nice to have a dedicated storage network that doesn't get stomped on by some network nonsense. These issues don't seem to occur too much anymore, especially with the advent of cheap 10gpbs gear.

    We have started to use NFS over 10gb for VMware, and its incredible. The speed is excellent, but the benefits of using NFS vs VMFS are pretty incredible as a start.

    But we also are always several steps behind in the technology. We are only now installing 8gpbs switches (used) and cards (also used) in our production environment, and we will likely keep 4gpbs in the dev/staging/DR environment until 8gbps becomes as cheap as 4gpbs is now. 4gps is still fast enough, but we had to replace our prod switches, and it was cheap enough to upgrade.

    We haven't purchased any new FC cards or switches in over 6 years, and we don't pay brocade, emulex or qlogic for support either. I don't see how they are going to make much money except from the banks/hospitals/megacorps that are so very entrenched in FC.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Q @joejones ->iSCSI ?

      What's this rumor that msft in near future is dropping iSCSI? Probably using old os will work well for many years before msft support dropped?

    2. Nate Amsden

      I'm just one

      but I have no plans to shift away from FC for my primary storage protocol for new and existing deployments. The cost of FC is minimal(in the grand scheme of things for me anyway) and provides a high level of availability and maturity that others still can't touch (includes FCoE).

      My environment is small though, at this point about two dozen physical hosts powering $220M/year in e-com transactions. Maybe we get to a $billion/year with four dozen hosts who knows (FC still cheap then).

  4. ROFLMAO

    From Sales

    As a sales person I always preferred selling FC over iSCSI solutions in greenfield opportunities. It was a much cleaner sale and selling a customer on a discrete physical network was much easier with FC than selling them on the need for much higher-end Ethernet switches they might have been purchasing. BTW adding a discrete storage network easily pays for its self within a year verses baking in the new network into an existing infrastructure. As far as end-user experience customers were equally satisfied with iSCSI and FC environments however I do see a tendency for customers with DR initiatives to retire FC and move to iSCSI. Shops where FC has the most traction would be any environment with security audits since there is no direct access to storage without a FC HBA and as described to me not having direct access to storage saves days of time during audits. In conclusion IMHO based on conversation and observation I have seen no difference in reliability between protocols between well designed and DOCUMENTED installs however I have seen some very smart people in continually very difficult situations because of poorly conceived environments.

    One more thing, as a sales person I am always amazed at the amount of time XXOs, managers, and minions will spend sales people and on what they base their decisions. The only proper way to make a storage purchase is build a scorecard and interview potential vendors and make them remove remove adjectives and adverbs from their pitch and deal with numbers and initiatives. At least 90% of the shops I visit paid and are paying premiums for unused features that are either of no value or they don't know how to use.

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