Emulex 16Gb FC HBAs Available on HP ProLiant Servers

Emulex Corporation announced that its LightPulse 16Gb FC HBA technology is available for use with the HP ProLiant DL and SL G7 systems.

The new HP SN1000E 16GFC HBAs are designed to support HP ProLiant Servers with PCI-Express I/O slots to connect to HP Storage arrays, offering backward compatibility with 4 and 8GFC adapters.

Supported HP server and storage array models include HP ProLiant DL165 G7, DL360 G7, DL380 G7, DL385 G7, DL580 G7, DL585 G7, and SL390s G7 Servers as well as HP 3PAR Storage Systems, HP P6000 EVA, HP P9500 XP Disk Arrays, and HP P2000 G3 MSA Array Systems. Emulex LightPulse 16GFC technology complements existing HP SAN infrastructure, including 16Gb FC switches and directors, providing an end-to-end solution.

HP support for Emulex adapters spans across generations and protocols. Customers can leverage a common driver stack and management tools when utilizing Emulex LightPulse FC adapters and OneConnect FC over Ethernet and iSCSI adapters, NICs), and LAN on Motherboards in HP data center environments.

"Seventy percent of servers rely on FC for shared storage resources1 and the number of VMs per server is expected to more than double in the next 24 months. Our 16GFC HBAs are optimized to provide the performance and scalability required for these growing IT workloads," said Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing, Emulex. "Customers can now benefit from the world's fastest FC performance with more than one million IOPS on a single port across the broad portfolio of HP ProLiant systems and industry leading HP storage."

The HP SN1000E single- (part #QR558A) and dual-channel (part #QR559A) adapters, based on LightPulse 16Gb FC technology, are designed for environments with increasing VM density and bandwidth requirements, enabling more applications and VMs to run on a single server and FC port, resulting in reduced cabling and a higher ROI. HP SN1000E adapters also simplify and streamline server and storage SAN connectivity requirements, while maintaining performance, with three times more IOPS per watt, and half the I/O response time of its 8GFC predecessor.

"Organizations want to optimize data center capacity, increase application performance and improve functionality," said Tom Joyce, vice president, Marketing, Strategy and Operations, Storage, HP. "The new 16GFC technology in HP SN1000E adapters delivers those improvements, as well as enhanced virtualization, management and power efficiency."

Additional features and benefits include:

• Performance: The HP SN1000E adapters enable more than five times the IOPS and twice the data throughput4 of 8GFC adapters.
• Scalability for Cloud and Virtualized Environments: These adapters also leverage Emulex vScale, which allows for support of up to 255 Virtual Functions (VFs), 1,024 Message Signal Interrupts Extended (MSI-X) and 8,192 concurrent logins and open exchanges, enabling support for more VMs than ever before, making it the solution for data centers looking to increase VM densities.
• Manageable I/O: With a single driver model, the HP SN1000E 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. 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.
• Data Center Simplicity: The HP SN1000E adapters yield consolidation benefits by enabling a reduction in cards and cables, while saving PCIe slots for other needs.