Emulex Drives Gen 16Gb FC HBAs Adopted by Several Partners

Emulex Corporation announced that more ecosystem partners have certified its LightPulse Gen 5 (16Gb) FC HBAs for flash storage, backup and security solutions, further extending the Gen 5 FC ecosystem.

ATTO Technology, Inc., Bloombase, Inc., Imation Corporation, Permabit Technology Corporation and Violin Memory, Inc. have certified Gen 5 FC HBAs with their solutions, enabling scalable, responsive solutions to accelerate applications, virtualization and I/O-intensive applications. The HBAs deliver increased SAN reliability, and management and consolidation simplicity, as well as application acceleration and higher throughput for virtualization, flash storage and mission-critical applications.

“The growth of data and the increased density of virtual environments continue to drive the need for increased storage performance via higher bandwidth and faster, low latency I/O. Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs tightly match the needs of today’s demanding data centers,” said Shaun Walsh, SVP marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “Continuing to partner with technology leaders such as ATTO, Bloombase, Imation, Permabit and Violin Memory extend the Gen 5 FC ecosystem with optimized solutions that provide massive IO/s support and ultra-low FC latency, while accelerating applications and maximizing QoS.”

Emulex partners continue to certify Gen 5 FC HBAs as the most widely deployed HBAs by OEMs [1]. Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs enable up to 20% more IO/s than other Gen 5 FC HBAs, plus lightning-fast response times with more than 1.2 million IO/s on a single port [2]. New Gen 5 Flash Services technology, which enables ExpressLane and CrossLink features, provide priority queuing and in-band FC message passing, available as a no-charge upgrade to currently shipping Gen 5 FC HBAs, enabling QoS and performance for mission-critical workloads running in flash arrays and server-based cache environments.

Partners have certified Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs for flash storage,
backup and security deployments in the following ways:

• ATTO Technology: It provides end-to-end solutions to help customers better store, manage, and deliver their data. It has certified the LPe16000 Gen 5 FC HBAs with its FastStream storage controllers, FibreBridge 6500 bridge and FibreConnect 8Gb FC and 16Gb FC switches, providing low latency, guaranteed bandwidth for time-sensitive applications, streaming media, virtualized, backup and recovery applications.
• Bloombase: It delivers application-transparent data at-rest encryption security for next-generation data centers. Bloombase has certified the LPe16000 Gen 5 FC HBA in servers with its StoreSafe, an all-in-one storage security software appliance to lock down sensitive enterprise data stored in SAN for any business applications from ERP, content management, and big data analytics, with the least infrastructure change.
• Imation: Its NexsanE-SeriesSAN storage system is a reliable, high-density, performance, efficient storage array that enables lower storage costs, maximum storage uptime, and storage ROI boosts for most any environment – whether traditional, virtual or cloud. Imation has certified the LPe16000 Gen 5 FC HBAs with the Nexsan E-Series storage system so that customers can benefit from increased bandwidth, IO/s and reduced latency.
• Permabit: In data efficiency technology, it delivers Albireo, an embedded performance OEM data optimization software to storage, application, and integrated IT vendors. It has certified the LPe16000 Gen 5 FC HBAs with Albireo, which enables storage vendors to deliver high speed data deduplication for primary archive or backup storage tiers that utilize either traditional HDD or flash-based storage.
• Violin Memory: Its flash memory arrays accelerate business critical applications and enable virtualized and optimized IT infrastructures. Designed for sustained performance with high reliability, flash memory arrays scale to hundreds of terabytes and millions of IO/s with low, sub-millisecond spike-free latency. Violin Memory has certified the LPe16000 Gen 5 FC HBAs as initiators against its 6000 Series flash memory arrays. This configuration was used in the Storage Switzerland report on designing a two million IO/s architecture.

“FC is the primary storage technology that scales from SMB through enterprise applications,” said Wayne Arvidson, VP marketing, ATTO. “Certifying Emulex LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs for use with our FastStream, FibreBridge and FibreConnect products gives customers a complete enterprise storage infrastructure, perfect for workgroup to data center environments, with the highest reliability, performance and lowest latency in the market.”

“Customers look to Bloombase to secure their business-sensitive data at-rest in virtual data centers, big data analytics, and private cloud storage with transparent encryption as the last line of defense against data breaches,” said Sean Xiang, CEO, Bloombase. “By utilizing Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs and Bloombase StoreSafe, customers can achieve blazing fast performance and unprecedented confidentiality for assets stored on FC SANs.”

“As our Nexsan E-Series customers scale their backup, virtual and cloud environments, they can benefit from the increased performance the Emulex LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs offer,” said Mike Stolz, VP marketing and technical support for Nexsan solutions, Imation. “This performance boost enhances the IT environment for Nexsan E-Series customers, helping to optimize their storage arrays for high capacity operation.”

“Emulex’s high performance, low latency Gen 5 FC HBA is ideally suited to Permabit’s ready-to-run Albireo Virtual Data Optimizer that provides deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning capabilities,” said Mike Ivanov, VP marketing, Permabit. “By combining these leading products, SANs can achieve inline data reduction without impact to throughput or latency, resulting in dramatic cost reduction.”

“Performance is very important to Violin Memory,” said Narayan Venkat, VP of product management, Violin Memory, “Emulex’s Gen 5 FC HBAs were a key element of our product demonstration of the Violin Memory 6000 Series flash Memory Arrays that resulted in more than 2 million IO/s at this year’s VMworld trade show.”

[1] Dell’Oro Group Adapter and Vendor Share Tables, 3Q13, November 2013
[2] Demartek Emulex LPe16000B 16Gb FC HBA Evaluation, October 2012