Emulex Delivers Quad-Channel 8Gb FC HBA

Emulex Corporation announced the availability of its latest Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) with four 8Gb/s ports on a single board.

By doubling the board capacity for its LightPulse HBAs, Emulex is providing end user customers with the increased performance and scalability necessary to support rich enterprise applications that require more bandwidth and an essential connectivity solution for next generation data centers.

The Emulex LPe12004 quad-channel 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBA is ideal for high-bandwidth, slot-limited servers, virtual tape libraries (VTLs), storage arrays and tape libraries. The LPe12004 supports both initiator and target mode usage simultaneously on a per port basis and maintains backwards compatibility with existing 4Gb/s and 2Gb/s Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs) and is equipped with a Service Level Interface (SLI), which enables driver compatibility across all generations of Emulex HBAs.  

"We continue to innovate our best-in-class connectivity solutions to solve growing customer pain points," said Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of business development, Emulex. "The LPe12004 addresses the bandwidth and slot constraint challenges of I/O intensive applications and next generation data centers."  

The LPe12004 is the newest member of the award-winning Emulex LightPulse family of 8Gb/s HBAs which provide customers with a wide range of capabilities including:

• Bandwidth that supports more virtual machines (VMs) per server than other solution.
• Enterprise scalability and flexibility through support for Message-Signaled Interrupts eXtended (MSI-X), offering end users greater CPU efficiency, reduced system latency and improved I/O throughput – all of which contribute to increased blade server performance and reduced power consumption.
• Common driver model, which allows a single driver to support all Emulex HBAs on a given operating system, lowering administrative costs and speeding server deployment.

"Emulex continues to demonstrate its commitment to providing customers with the connectivity solutions to meet the performance and density requirements for Fibre Channel deployments," said Steve Munroe, President, SANBlaze. "Today’s announcement allows SANBlaze to offer higher density, scalable Fibre Channel Emulation solutions that meet our customers continued demand for cost effective emulation solutions for storage product development and testing."