COSTA MESA, Calif, 7 August 2012 – Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX) today announced that its new LightPulse® 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapter (HBA) technology is now available for use with EMC storage arrays through the EMC Select program. Designed for the next generation of high-density cloud, virtualization and business critical applications, the new Emulex 16GFC LPe16000-E and LPe16002-E adapters are perfectly positioned as customers begin investing in new server and storage infrastructure to meet these data centre demands.

“Larger and faster databases, solid state disk, and next-generation servers are some of the I/O intensive technologies accelerating the need for 16GFC,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Emulex. “We offer the highest-performing adapters on the market today, as evidenced by a recent ESG Lab[1] report that revealed that our 16GFC adapters drive more than five times the IOPS than its 8GFC predecessor, and 75 per cent less latency. This level of performance and speed enables customers to take advantage of the technology that tackles the ever-increasing growth of data.”

Emulex 16GFC HBAs are optimized for cloud and virtualized environments, delivering more than a million IOPS on a single port[2], while simplifying and streamlining server and storage SAN connectivity requirements, and cutting the response time by 75 per cent compared to its 8GFC predecessor[1]. Upgrading to these new Emulex 16GFC adapters is simple, with full backward compatibility with 4 and 8GFC adapters from Emulex, including a common driver stack and management tools across multiple generations. In addition to future proofing customer’s connectivity investment, Emulex 16GFC HBAs provide higher performance and lower latency even when running in 8GFC mode in an 8GFC environment[1], making Emulex 16GFC HBAs an ideal choice for customers looking to leverage their storage infrastructure investments into the future.

“Fibre Channel is still the primary storage technology used to support virtualized server environments for many of our customers,” said Deirdre Wassell, director, EMC Solutions Marketing. “Emulex 16GFC technology fits our customers’ needs with high-performance and reduced latency without having to replace their existing SANs, which is even more compelling in an era where reducing costs remains a high priority.”

Additional key features and benefits of the new Emulex 16GFC adapters include:

Increasing VM Densities: Emulex 16GFC adapters leverage Emulex vScale™ for superior scalability, supporting  up to 255 virtual functions (VFs), 1024 Message Signal Interrupts Extended (MSI-X) and 8192 concurrent logins and open exchanges, up to four times the number supported by competing 16GFC HBAs[3], enabling support for more VMs per server than ever before.

Exclusive BlockGuard™ Data Protection: Emulex 16GFC adapters include support for Emulex BlockGuard T10 Protection Information (T10-PI), which provides enhanced data protection against silent data corruption.

Simplified and Time-Saving I/O Management: With a single driver model, the Emulex 16GFC adapters can be controlled, configured and managed from a single console using Emulex OneCommand® Manager, enabling enterprise scalability with time-saving features that provide more than twice the adapter management functionality and take half the time to install and manage compared to other I/O solutions.[4] Emulex OneCommand® Manager plug-in for VMware vCenter™ Server allows users to manage Emulex adapters across hundreds of servers, natively from the VMware vCenter Server console so administrators don’t waste time juggling multiple management applications.

Reduced Data Centre CAPEX and OPEX: Emulex 16GFC adapters yield consolidation benefits including significant cost savings by enabling a reduction in cards, cables and the number of switch ports required when using a 16GFC fabric, as well as delivering associated power savings through better IOPS per watt performance. PCIe slots are also freed-up for other needs.

For more information, please visit the Emulex landing page for EMC.

[1] ESG Lab Validation Report, February 2012
[2] Based on Emulex Labs benchmark testing
[3] Based on Emulex Labs benchmark testing
[4] Based on Emulex Labs benchmark testing