Emulex introduces Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters and Converged Fabric Adapters

“Our new quad-port Gen 5 FC HBA is the only HBA in the market that provides up to 2.4 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) and four ports of full Gen 5 FC (16GFC) performance on a single HBA, driving mission critical virtualisation, database, and storage target workloads. Our new quad-port low profile Gen 5 8GFC HBA uniquely delivers the PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 performance needed for virtualisation and cloud workloads on mainstream 8GFC infrastructures, yet is compact enough for dense, 1U servers,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “In addition, our new dual-port CFA enables data centres, service providers, and specialised appliances to run FC one day and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) the next without disruption. This is critical in multi-tenant environments because it enables adapter standardisation for data centres that run both FC and FCoE SANs simultaneously, which streamlines deployment, reduces cost and overhead inventory. ”

New Gen 5 FC HBAs Accelerate and Maximise Application Performance
The new Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs are ideal for deployment with IOPS-hungry flash and cache workloads, enabling data centres to achieve maximum performance and quality of service (QoS) across the network between their caching devices or flash based arrays. New Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs also enable increased virtual machine (VM) ratios, mission-critical application virtualisation, and support larger/faster database applications with the best IOPS and latency performance in the industry today. The two new adapters include the following:
· Emulex LPe16004 Gen 5 FC HBA: The LPe16004 is the only quad-port Gen 5 FC HBA available in the market. It delivers superior performance with 2.4 million IOPS per HBA1, up to 1.2 million IOPS on a single port, and more than twice the IOPS of other 16GFC HBAs2, making it ideal for environments that need to maximise FC connectivity, high-availability, and performance, including solid state disks (SSDs) and new multi-core processor servers.
· Emulex LPe15004 Gen 5 FC HBA: The Emulex LPe15004 quad-port low-profile Gen 5 HBA is the fastest 8GFC HBA in the industry, delivering up to 1.2 million IOPS on a single port, which is 6x more IOPS than competing 8GFC HBAs2. In addition, the LPe15004 is the only 8GFC HBA that supports PCIe 3.0 and T10 Protection Information (PI) with high-performance offload acceleration. With lightning fast latency and better IOPS performance than other 8GFC HBAs, it is ideal for the toughest virtualised, cloud and mission-critical workloads.

Industry’s Most Flexible Converged Fabric Adapter
The new LPe16202 dual-port Gen 5 FC CFA is capable of Gen 5 Fibre Channel (16Gb/8Gb Fibre Channel) or 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) personalities for virtualised data centres and private clouds, providing unparalleled flexibility to run multiple protocols and speeds with a simple optics change. The ability to change fabric personalities is seamless via plug-and-play auto-detection of SFP+ optical transceivers without software configuration changes. Depending on which optical transceiver is installed, the CFA will intelligently know to run in FC or FCoE mode. In an Ethernet environment, the LPe16202 CFA provides full Ethernet connectivity concurrently with FCoE and also supports direct attach copper (DAC) for 10GbE connectivity.

Benefits of the Emulex CFA include the following:
· Design Flexibility and Simplicity: For OEMs, system integrators, and appliance vendors, this CFA enables one adapter to be qualified, inventoried and configured at the time of shipment as either a Gen 5 FC HBA running at 8GFC or 16GFC, or 10GbE FCoE adapter based on the optics plugged into the adapter.
· Seamless Protocol Migration: For enterprise data centres and service providers using FC today, this new CFA makes it easy to migrate to FCoE without having to rip and replace adapters and drivers. Data centres running both FC and FCoE storage systems will benefit from standardising on one adapter, simplifying their qualification process and streamlining spares inventory.

All Emulex HBAs and CFAs offer OneCore™ Storage Software Development Kit (SDK) support. The Emulex OneCore Storage SDK provides simplified driver support to accelerate the process of developing Gen 5 FC storage solutions to meet the dynamic needs of the storage array and storage appliance markets that require enterprise-class, high bandwidth and low latency I/O connectivity. All Emulex HBAs and CFAs can also be controlled, configured, and managed from a single console using Emulex OneCommand® Manager to enable enterprise scalability with time-saving features that provide more than twice the management functionality and take half the time to install and manage compared to other I/O solutions3. Emulex OneCommand Manager plug-in for VMware vCenter™ Server allows users to manage hundreds of Emulex adapters natively from the VMware vCenter Server console with the option of using a web-based client or desktop client.

“Modern data centres are more complex than ever, with mixed protocols, running thousands of VMs, and requiring the I/O throughput and performance to match the emerging flash caching, SSD and virtualised solutions entering the market,” said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “This new class of Gen 5 FC HBAs from Emulex provides the balanced IOPS and low latency that enables organisations to take full advantage of these high performance caching solutions.”