New Adapters Provide Cost-Effective 10GbE by Leveraging Existing Cabling Infrastructure

COSTA MESA, Calif, February 7, 2012 - Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX) today announced the availability of 10GBASE-T adapters as part of its next-generation Emulex OneConnect™ 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) Universal Converged Network Adapter (UNCA) family, providing 10GbE connectivity over twisted pair cables, reducing deployment costs, increasing deployment simplicity and delivering investment protection. The OCe11102-NT NIC and OCe11102-IT iSCSI adapters are ideally suited for data centres that are using twisted pair cabling and are transitioning from 1GbE to 10GbE infrastructure. For customers deploying 10GbE in their data centres today, the ability to use existing 10GBASE-T Cat 6a cabling versus optical cabling makes 10GbE performance less cost prohibitive, yielding a 37% savings.

"By expanding our 10GbE offerings with 10GBASE-T solutions, we're now delivering 10x the performance at a fraction of the price of ten 1GbE NICs, lowering overall cost of deployment for 10GbE networking," said Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing, Emulex. "Combined with solutions from our ecosystem partners, 10GBASE-T is now a reality and we anticipate it will contribute to the rapid acceleration of 10GbE market adoption."

The OCe11102-NT NIC and OCe11102-IT iSCSI adapters include the following benefits and features:

- Reduced Deployment Cost: With 10GBASE-T, Emulex is delivering 10GbE performance at half the cost per Gigabit of deploying 1GbE, including fewer switches, cables and adapters. Additionally, customers will receive power savings using fewer links.

- Deployment Simplicity: Using industry-standard twisted pair cables, OCe11102-NT and OCe11102-IT adapters can be used with Cat 6 and Cat 6a network cabling already deployed in data centres today, and are backwards compatible with existing 1GbE Ethernet networks.

- Optimised for Virtualised Environments: Emulex's Universal Multi-Channel (UMC) capabilities enable IT managers to have switch independent NIC partitioning that enables multiple PCI functions for each OneConnect 10GbE adapter port, which can then be assigned to optimise virtual server deployments. A dual-port OneConnect 10GBASE-T adapter provides eight logical NICs, allowing the replacement of two quad-port 1GbE NICs with a single, lower cost 10GBASE-T card.

- iSCSI over Data Centre Bridging (DCB): Emulex's Enterprise iSCSI technology supports IEEE DCB standards that ensure consistent iSCSI performance over a converged, lossless Ethernet network. Using DCB, Emulex iSCSI adapters support bandwidth allocation between network and storage traffic groups to optimise use of a high-performance 10GbE infrastructure. For customers still using iSCSI over 1GbE, the OCe11102-IT adapter future-proofs deployments, making them 10GbE ready at a similar cost to 1GbE iSCSI HBAs.

- Manageable I/O: By sharing a single driver model, Emulex I/O solutions can be controlled, configured and managed from a single console using OneCommand™ Manager. Consolidated management capabilities enable 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[1]. In addition, the OneCommand™ Manager plug-in for VMware vCenter™ lets users manage Emulex adapters directly from the vCenter console for reduced complexity and is the only adapter that integrates with VMware management tools.

The Emulex 10GBASE-T OCe11102-NT NICs ($882 MSRP) and OCe11102-IT iSCSI adapters ($1049 MSRP) are available now.

Supporting Quotes:
"The 1GbE-10GbE transition is at an inflection point and 10GBASE-T's broad interoperability and ability to leverage existing data centre cabling lowers the cost of 10GbE and accelerates adoption this year and next," said Ed Chapman, vice president of Business Development, Arista Networks. "Emulex and Arista Networks' support of 10GBASE-T connectivity makes 10GbE a reality for data centers."

“As a pioneer in 10GBASE-T technology, Extreme Networks is pleased to work with Emulex as they bring cost effective 10GBASE-T connectivity solutions to market, completing the ecosystem to the server," said Shehzad Merchant, vice president of technology, Extreme Networks. "In today’s data centre networks, traffic is exploding and 10GBASE-T provides one of the best low cost infrastructure options.  By combining our high performance 10GBASE-T switches, such as the BlackDiamond 8800 and Summit X650, with Emulex's new UCNAs, customers can more easily deploy their 10GbE networks.”

"Reducing cabling complexity is a huge part of the drive towards data centre consolidation today and 10GBASE-T simplifies the physical infrastructure, lowering costs and increasing operational efficiency," said Tom Walsh, Director - Copper Products, Panduit. "Emulex's new 10GBASE-T cards offer a tenfold speed increase and interoperability with Cat6/6a cabling, which is necessary to ensure more customers can use the infrastructure they already have, which remains a data centre priority."

"10GBASE-T represents a technology inflection point in the 10GbE market that will spur adoption in the volume rack server market," said Seamus Crehan, president, Crehan Research. "As Emulex and others ship 10GBASE-T adapters, we predict that adoption will start to pick up during the first half of 2012, driven by price, performance and next-generation server shipments."

[1] Based on Emulex Labs benchmark testing

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Read the Emulex Labs blog: “Emulex OneConnect Twisted Sisters:  Announcing the new OCe11102-T Adapters”
Download the ‘10GBASE-T vs. GbE Cost Comparison’ whitepaper
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