Emulex LightPulse 8GFC HBAs Implemented by Hitachi

Emulex Corporation announced that its LightPulse 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs have been implemented by Hitachi, Ltd. BladeSymphony 2000 Blade Servers. With this announcement, customers can leverage Fibre Channel connectivity with the combined performance, throughput and flexibility required for today’s virtualized data center environments.

  BladeSymphony 2000

"Virtualization is driving customers to speed up the adoption of 8Gb/s Fibre Channel in their virtualized data center environments to support the ever-growing need for greater performance and scalability," said Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of business development, Emulex. "Hitachi’s qualification of Emulex LightPulse 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs for its BladeSymphony 2000 delivers the throughput and flexibility necessary to support the I/O-intensive workloads that are a result of maximizing the benefits of consolidation through virtualization on a robust blade server."
 
Using a balanced system architecture that combines increased throughput, leveraging Emulex 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs, embedded virtualization, and a multitude of configuration options, the new Hitachi BladeSymphony 2000 is targeted at I/O-intensive workloads.

"As a longstanding partner, we’ve relied on Emulex to provide the most advanced, high performing Storage Area Network (SAN) connectivity for our BladeSymphony family, and with the rock-solid capabilities we’re delivering with this new blade server, we wanted to ensure the Fibre Channel connectivity mirrored that functionality, and Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs were the obvious choice," said Toshiaki Kawamura, general manager of Server Operations in Hitachi Enterprise Server Division. "Given the sea-change virtualization has brought to data centers, changing the way physical hardware accesses storage resources, it is important to have a solution that can enable multiple applications on a single host, through multiple storage interfaces to multiple Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) on multiple SAN arrays, and Emulex provides that to our customers. The Hitachi BladeSymphony 2000 blade server delivers 50 percent more robust system performance, four-times the memory capacity and seven-times the I/O throughput of previous blade server generations."

Emulex SAN connectivity solutions are ideal for large-scale Fibre Channel deployments offering common drivers and virtual HBA technology based on industry-standard N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV). This provides virtual machines with independent access to the SAN through shared HBA resources, enabling customers to leverage critical SAN management tools and best practices within virtualized server environments.

Emulex LightPulse HBAs utilize Emulex’s OneCommand Manager for secure, virtualized, automated and centralized enterprise management for deployment, dynamic provisioning, asset management, virtual I/O services, connectivity management, security, and quality of service for virtualized and converged networking environments.