Emulex FC-to-SATA Bridge Selected for 3PAR

Emulex Corporation announced that its BR-2401 embedded storage bridge has been selected for use within 3PAR InServ Storage Servers.

Emulex’s sophisticated FC-to-SATA bridge solution enables high-capacity SATA hard disk drives to be integrated into the back-end of 3PAR’s InServ arrays with minimal effort. With this integration, 3PAR customers can take advantage of both low-cost, high-capacity SATA along with Fibre Channel disk capacity within the same drive chassis, efficiently leveraging tiered storage capacity with 3PAR’s Thin Built In(tm) technology.

"Emulex’s unique bridging solutions have been field-proven in data centers around the world,” said Bob Whitson, senior vice president and general manager, embedded storage products, Emulex Corporation. "Today’s announcement further signifies the continued adoption of Emulex bridges as the preferred method for seamlessly deploying any size or brand of SATA disk drive within enterprise-class storage environments.”

Emulex embedded storage technologies are used by the world’s top 10 storage OEMs. The Emulex BR-2401, which connects over 80% of all SATA drives in external storage systems, provides an abstraction layer that isolates the external storage system from the idiosyncrasies associated with different types and suppliers of SATA and solid state drives (SSD). This abstraction layer dramatically reduces the development time required to bring high-capacity or ultra-high performance storage solutions to market and enables vendor-independent drive selection.

"3PAR is known in the market for highly virtualized, dynamically tiered storage systems capable of delivering multiple classes of service from a single, consolidated array,” said Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing, 3PAR. "With Emulex’s embedded storage bridge, 3PAR’s enterprise-class storage arrays not only offer organizations a cost effective option for tiered storage consolidation, but also support our ‘Nearline for Online’ solution, which leverages dedicated SATA-based capacity to support online applications such as email or databases.”

In addition to Emulex’s embedded storage products, 3PAR also fully qualifies and supports Emulex LightPulse Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) for mission-critical SAN connectivity. All 3PAR Storage Servers, including the new 3PAR InServ T-Class Storage Servers with Thin Built In, announced today, provide support for organizations implementing Emulex HBAs in their hosts.