Emulex 10GbE and 16Gb FC Adapters Selected by Lenovo

Emulex Corporation announced it is delivering 10GbE and Gen 5 16Gb FC connectivity for Lenovo ThinkServer tower and rack servers with the new OneConnect OCe14000 family of 10GbE Ethernet Network and CNAs and LightPulse LPe16000 Gen 5 FC HBAs.

“This announcement represents our first Ethernet design win with Lenovo, and provides the infrastructure required for the demands of today’s data centers,” said Shaun Walsh, SVP marketing, Emulex. “Our latest generation of Ethernet and Gen 5 FC adapters are purpose-built to meet the performance capabilities and workload demands of Lenovo servers. Emulex OCe14000 adapters deliver increased throughput and reduce power consumption and operational expenditures, while addressing next generation workloads such as VDI, Hadoop and server virtualization.“

OneConnect 10GbE adapters and LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs offer flexible connectivity, performance and can be controlled, configured and managed from a single console using Emulex OneCommand Manager, which consolidates all I/O on a single driver to reduce complexity and ensure stability.

OneConnect 10GbE Ethernet and CNAs enable:

• Server virtualization density and performance: Emulex OCe14000 adapters are a connectivity solution to deliver consistent line rate throughput, up to 1.5 million IO/s for block storage and hardware offloads that deliverCPU and power efficiency, resulting in the ability to increase the number of VMs per server for Red Hat Linux 6.4, Windows Server 2012 R2 or VMware ESXi 5.5 environments.
• Reduced data center operational expenditures by lowering server power consumption: Emulex hardware offload technology can reduce power consumption by up to 50W for a typical 2 socket rack optimized server (1), which lowers the server power costs by up to 20% (based on average power consumption of 250W per a server).
• Optimized application performance with low-latency connectivity for virtualization: Emulex has implemented RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), delivering I/O with reduced latency to applications such as SQL Server and targeted network functions such as VM mobility using Windows Server SMB Direct and Linux NFS protocols.
• A 4x improvement in packet performance vs. previous generation adapters: OCe14000 adapters deliver a 4x performance increase in small packet network performance, vs. previous generation adapters, which is critical for transaction-heavy and clustered applications such as video content delivery, web-scale applications and messaging applications.
• Secure and scalable cloud deployments using software-defined networking and open technology: OCe14000 are designed to work with open and industry standard hardware, network virtualization and software environments, including OpenStack-based management and orchestration software, emerging network virtualization using Network Virtualization Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE) (used in Hyper-V) and Network Virtualization and Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) (used in VMware NSX). Emulex is also providing 10/40GbE CNAs for the OpenCompute project supporting open and standards-based Web-scale data centers.

LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs enable:

• Gen 5 FC connectivity: Gen 5 FC HBAs deliver more than 1.2 million IO/s on a single port (1) and up to 6x greater IO/s per port than the previous generation, enabling better storage performance for cloud and storage intensive applications. Power efficiency is also improved by delivering up to 4x better IO/s per watt of power (1).
• Higher throughput and low latency: Gen 5 FC HBAs provide twice the throughput and up to 75% lower latency when compared to current 8G FC adapters without sacrificing CPU efficiency (1).
• Increased I/O bandwidth with PCIe 3.0 support: Gen 5 FC HBAs support PCIe 3.0, which provides a faster I/O bus, more PCIe lanes and increased I/O bandwidth, enabling Gen 5 FC technology to provide optimal performance for applications, such as virtualization and database management systems, by matching the performance capabilities of server platforms based on the new Xeon processor E5-2600 V2 product family.
• Improved QoS with Gen 5 Flash services: Gen 5 Flash Services includes ExpressLane, which provides QoS capabilities for flash/SSD-based storage and Emulex CrossLink, which provides in-band message passing between server nodes, delivering optimized performance using lossless, standards-based FC protocols.

“Our goal is to address the real-world IT needs of our customers’ business-critical workloads with enterprise, open industry-standard solutions that provide the ideal balance of performance and features, and ease-of-use and integration with our enterprise product offerings,” said Darrel Ward, VP and GM, enterprise product group, Lenovo. “We are pleased to partner together to provide high performance FC and 10GbE adapters that offer integrated ease-of-use with Lenovo ThinkServer tower and rack servers to our customers.“

OneConnect 10GbE Ethernet and CNAs and LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs are available for Lenovo ThinkServer TD340 tower, RD340/RD440 and RD540/RD640 rack servers.

(1) Demartek Emulex LPe16000B 16Gb FC HBA Evaluation, October 2012