Emulex Upgrades OneCore Storage SDK to 5.0

Emulex Corporation announced the lastest release of OneCore Storage Software Development Kit (SDK) 5.0/, a comprehensive solution for independent hardware and software vendors (IHVs and ISVs) and system integrators to create target side drivers in a custom, high efficiency environment, for storage, SSD and applications that require low latency and high performance I/O connectivity.

It offers a range of storage applications and back-end support, as well as support for all Emulex I/O connectivity solutions, including LightPulse 16Gb FC HBAs and the new OneConnect OCe14000 family of network adapters and CNAs.

“We have worked with our development partners to accelerate and simplify integration and time-to-market of solutions with the newest version of the OneCore Storage SDK. The addition of the target control module feature makes it easy to support almost any flavor of Linux used in networking and storage appliance markets that require enterprise reliability, high bandwidth and low latency I/O connectivity,” said Shaun Walsh, SVP marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “With Emulex’s new OCe14000 family now supported in the OneCore Storage SDK, developers can take advantage of our industry-leading protocol offload capabilities to scale the capabilities of their products, have optimal CPU efficiency and maximize performance.“

The OneCore Storage SDK driver architecture provides design flexibility, enabling selective use of modular layers to meet customer-specific requirements and architectural needs.

In addition, OneCore Storage SDK includes following benefits:

• Flexibility and Protocol Support: It now supports all protocol speeds including 8Gb FC, 16Gb FC, FCoE , iSCSI and 10GbE, with 40GbE support to follow. Developers can leverage the SDK with one protocol and transfer that development to another protocol easily, substantially reducing future development time and efforts and speeding time to market.
• Back-end and Platform Support: It includes broad support for SCSI Target Subsystem for Linux (SCST), FreeBSD, Random Access Memory Disk (RAMD), UserSpace and a technology preview of support for Target Core Module (TCM), formerly known as linux-iscsi.org (LIO). The architecture also allows customers to utilize their own customer-specific back-end or standard Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux [RHEL] 6.4 or FreeBSD 9.2 back-ends. In addition, the OS agnostic design facilitates the option of porting the drivers to other OSes.
• Modular Driver Architecture: It has a driver architecture that provides a reference driver which can be used by customers as the foundation or as a building block for their driver. The OneCore Storage SDK consists of Emulex’s Service Level Interface (SLI), Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), transport code and abstracted OS interfaces for OS-specific implementations.
• Standards Support: Drivers provide support for standards such as N_Port Identification Virtualization (NPIV), which allows users to maintain SAN best practices within a virtualized environment, T10 Protection Information (T10 PI) which provides enhanced data protection against silent data corruption, Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) for iSCSI security and MC/S (Multiple Connections per Session) for iSCSI failover.

“DataCore has been working with Emulex and the OneCore Storage team to develop drivers to support Gen 5 FC with SANsymphony-V,” said Carlos M. Carreras, VP alliances and business development, DataCore Software Corp. “The driver development kit and the team at Emulex have been instrumental in our efforts to provide a high performance, low latency connectivity path for customers implementing SANsymphony-V to virtualize their storage hardware. The flexibility and ease of portability are major features that we, as a software-defined storage leader, value as we provide enhanced support for additional protocols, such as FCoE and iSCSI.”

“SGI server platforms and the SGI InfiniteStorage solutions both leverage the performance of the Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs to improve the bandwidth,” said Doug Rainbolt, VP and GM of storage business unit, Silicon Graphics International Corp. “As a long-time partner of Emulex, SGI is able to provide its customers the most reliable and best performing connectivity solutions.”