Emulex Teams With Cisco and VMware

Emulex
Corporation announced the availability of a storage
networking solution that runs on VMware virtualization infrastructure
and incorporates Emulex LightPulse 4Gb/s host bus adapters (HBAs),
Cisco MDS Fibre Channel switches and VMware ESX Server 3.5.

The new offering leverages industry-standard NPIV to provide
customers with the functionality to maintain storage area network (SAN)
best practices, while delivering improved Quality of Service (QoS) and
data protection capabilities. Additionally, Emulex has teamed with
Cisco and VMware to integrate NPIV functionality into VMware VMotion
technology, which enhances storage access by maintaining the same
Virtual Port ID while migrating live virtual machines from one physical
host to another.

"This solution brings together the best in virtualized server and
storage technologies, innovation and expertise by combining the unique
features associated with NPIV and VMware VMotion. VMware VMotion helps
eliminate downtime and works with NPIV to ensure a continuous SAN
connection during the virtual machine migration process, and enables
leverage of critical features and functionality, such as zoning," said
Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing, Emulex
Corporation. "By working with Cisco and VMware, we can provide our
joint customers with a complete set of tools to enable
infrastructure-wide virtualization and its full benefits including
business continuity, disaster recovery and simplified IT management."

Home Interiors & Gifts, Inc., the largest direct seller of home
accessories in North America, is currently migrating more than 100
Windows server hosts to a VMware virtualized environment and is in the
process of converting all of its SAN connectivity to Emulex LightPulse
HBAs.

"We are impressed with the capabilities of Emulex HBAs and the
relationship between Emulex, Cisco and VMware. Implementing Emulex’s
LightPulse Virtual HBA technology with industry-standard NPIV support
is a necessary step in our ongoing transition to a virtualized data
center environment," said Levi Spears, SAN and Windows system
administrator, Home Interiors & Gifts, Inc. "With the full
integration of Emulex Virtual HBA technology within VMware ESX Server,
we now have an easy route to implement SAN management best practices
with capabilities such as zoning, array LUN masking and mapping across
all of our virtual machines."

Another key capability of using the Emulex, Cisco and VMware
solution includes the ability to create a unique identity for each
virtual machine that can be tracked throughout the SAN. With this
virtual machine identity, the data center manager can track statistics
such as I/O throughput and error rates to better manage storage traffic
and detect errors at the virtual machine level.

Emulex

VMWare

Cisco 

Home Interiors & Gifts, Inc.