Emulex 8Gb HBAs now Supported by NetApp

Emulex Corporation announced that its LightPulse 8Gb/s Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) are now supported and shipping for use with NetApp storage systems. Emulex’s new 8Gb/s HBAs provide NetApp customers with the advanced virtualization features, increased bandwidth and manageability required to support the broad deployment of virtualized servers and multi-core servers.

"More customers are moving to virtualized server environments, and need to upgrade their SAN infrastructures to 8Gb/s Fibre Channel as a result," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing for NetApp. "Working with Emulex to support their LightPulse family of 8Gb/s HBAs delivers maximum efficiency today, while helping our customers seamlessly transition to next-generation SAN connectivity that protects existing investments."

Emulex’s 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs also support Virtual HBA technology, which allows users to effectively virtualize the HBA functionality so each virtual machine running on a server can independently access its own protected storage. Emulex Virtual HBA technology also allows customers to leverage SAN management tools and best practices, such as fabric zoning and LUN mapping/masking.

"Emulex has taken a leadership role in delivering support for virtualized server environments, enterprise-class performance, manageability and scalability in its SAN connectivity solutions," said Scott McIntyre, vice president customer marketing, Emulex. "With this announcement, NetApp customers can now optimize their data centers by leveraging the advanced capabilities of Emulex’s latest 8Gb/s HBA offering."

The new Emulex LPe12000 family of 8Gb/s PCI Express HBAs offer customers 37 percent greater transaction rates and 33 percent more effective CPU utilization over competing 8Gb/s HBA products, delivering the performance and scalability necessary to support the growing number of applications running on virtualized servers and blade servers. Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs also feature support for Message-Signaled Interrupts eXtended (MSI-X), an interrupt handling mechanism, which is ideal for transaction-intensive environments. In a recent Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) benchmark, Emulex’s 8Gb/s HBAs contributed to a 14 percent increase in the total number of transactions performed per second over a similar test conducted in 2007.

For more information on the Emulex LPe12000 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBA family