Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX), a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, today announced  that its Emulex Engine™ (XE)201 I/O Controller provides best-of-breed Gen 5 Fibre Channel (FC) connectivity on the target side for the EMC® VMAX® enterprise storage arrays, enabling true end-to-end 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) from server, to switch, to storage. EMC VMAX 10K and 40K storage arrays also provide data integrity protection with support for the T10 Protection Information standard (T10 PI). When combined with Emulex Gen 5 FC (8GFC and 16GFC) HBAs with T10 PI and supported operating systems (OSs), customers can benefit from end-to-end protection against costly and time consuming silent data corruption.

“EMC and Emulex are delivering a true 16GFC end-to-end infrastructure that addresses the new demands of the data centre for flash, I/O caching, server virtualisation and big data,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “As Gen 5 FC adoption continues to ramp, Emulex connectivity solutions on both the host and target side will provide next-generation management, application optimisation, virtualisation and scalability, providing more than just a speed bump in performance.”

EMC VMAX 10K and 40K storage arrays, when paired with Emulex Gen 5 FC technology, provide an end-to-end 16GFC enterprise storage solution delivering the necessary performance, availability, and intelligence for virtualised data centres. Emulex Gen 5 FC technology, when leveraged in target mode, enables the highest level[1] of performance available today for storage connectivity.

“The EMC VMAX storage arrays extend our lead in tier-1 storage,” said, Isabelle Guis, Vice President Marketing, Enterprise Storage Division, EMC Corporation. “Emulex Gen 5 FC technology complements our mission-critical offering for many customers in the EMC Select program with needs for reliability data integrity, high performance, and ease of use, thanks to seamless compatibility and upgrades.”

Emulex LightPulse® Gen 5 FC Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) are based on the Emulex XE201 I/O Controller, and supports a range of features for both server initiator and storage target modes:

Extreme performance: Emulex Gen 5 FC technology is the industry’s fastest, with more than 1.2 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) on a single port[1], which is seven times faster than current HBAs being offered by Emulex’s nearest competitor[2]. Emulex field-proven Gen 5 FC technology is ideal for EMC customers that are building next generation data centres designed for speed and agility.
Advanced data protection with high performance offload: Emulex Gen 5 FC technology supports the T10 Protection Information (T10 PI) standard, providing enhanced data protection against silent data corruption as data traverses the system from the OS all the way to the disk array. Emulex’s newest Gen 5 FC technology also includes high performance, hardware offload of data integrity checks, eliminating the 30 per cent performance penalty of software-enabled T10 PI[3].
Rock-solid reliability: Emulex Gen 5 FC technology is highly reliable, with more than 10 million hours mean time between failure (MTBF)[4] on the LightPulse family  of HBAs with features  fewer moving parts than other Gen 5 HBAs[2].
Emulex LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs support a broad portfolio of EMC storage arrays and are qualified for use through the EMC Select program. Emulex second-generation LightPulse LPe16000B Gen 5 HBAs are also available for use with EMC storage arrays through the EMC Select program. Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs are ideal for I/O intensive applications such as flash caching, high-density virtualisation environments and databases. When used with EMC XtremSW™ Cache intelligent server flash caching software, Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs provide a high-performance solution, reducing overall latency and increasing storage area network (SAN) performance.

[1] Demartek Emulex LPe16000B 16Gb Fibre Channel HBA Evaluation, October 2012
[2] Demartek Emulex LPe16000B 16Gb Fibre Channel HBA Feature Comparison, December 2012
[3] Based on Emulex Labs benchmark testing
[4] Emulex 16GFC HBAs data sheet