Emulex Supports SAS and SSDs

Emulex Corporation is expanding the performance and versatility of its market-leading InSpeed Bridging Technology through the addition of enterprise storage system support for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) to Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) bridging in SAS environments, support for SAS Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) in Fibre Channel environments, and support for ultra-high performance Solid State Drives (SSDs) in both SAS and Fibre Channel environments.

“The addition of these critical new bridging capabilities expand the market and technology leadership of Emulex’s InSpeed Bridging technology allowing our original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers to quickly and confidently integrate SAS and SATA protocol-based HDD and SSD devices into either SAS or Fibre Channel storage systems,” said Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of business development, Emulex. “Emulex’s fourth generation bridging technology provides the most robust, resilient and comprehensive HDD and SSD support in the industry.”

Emulex’s InSpeed Bridging technology delivers industry-leading system resiliency, stability and performance through its trusted abstraction layer that isolates enterprise storage systems from the idiosyncrasies associated with different interface protocols (Fibre Channel, SAS and SATA) and drive formats (HDD and 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.

“Emulex and Xyratex have a long-standing relationship bringing to market innovation that has driven increased performance and robustness in Fibre Channel storage systems,” said Todd Gresham, senior vice president, Networked Storage Solutions, Xyratex. “By leveraging Emulex’s next generation InSpeed SAS bridging technology, our OEM customers will be able to lower costs and improve reliability, which will increase their ability to address new market opportunities in today’s enterprise storage environment.”

“The increasing requirements derived from I/O intensive applications continue to grow the market for SSD-based enterprise systems. SSD shipments are forecast to more than double on a compound annual basis through 2013,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research manager, hard disk drive components and solid state drives at IDC. “Through the addition of support for flash-based SSDs into its new InSpeed Bridging technology, Emulex is positioned to capitalize on this new strategic enterprise business dynamic.”

Today’s Flash-based SSDs are predominantly based on the SATA interface. Emulex InSpeed bridges provide options for system OEM customers to connect these high performance SATA SSDs to enterprise systems using external Fibre Channel or SAS bridge interposer boards, while maintaining enterprise-level robustness and performance. Alternatively, SSD vendors can integrate bridging silicon into their devices to provide a native Fibre Channel or SAS SSD.

“SandForce is working closely with Emulex to enable customers to build enterprise-class SSDs that connect to Fibre Channel or SAS systems,” said Thad Omura, vice president of marketing, SandForce. “Emulex’s next generation InSpeed flexible bridging options enable our SATA-based Enterprise SSD Processor, to be used with either Fibre Channel or SAS systems. In initial testing, we’ve found the new InSpeed bridge technology provides a robust and high performance solution for SSD applications.”