From Broadcom, Availability of Emulex Gen 7 LPe36000 Series HBAs 64Gb FC HBA and SAN Manager V.1.2

Broadcom Inc. announced the availability of its Emulex Gen 7 LPe36000-series HBAs – a 64Gb FC HBA.

LPe36002 M64 FC HBA

With this release, the company is the first in the industry to provide a complete portfolio of products that enable an end-to-end 64Gb data path.

“With the introduction of the Emulex LPe36000-series, Broadcom is now shipping all the technology needed to build out a complete Gen 7 64G network, optimizing mission-critical application performance using Emulex FC HBAs for server and storage arrays, Brocade FC switches, and Broadcom optics,” said Jeff Hoogenboom, VP and GM, Emulex connectivity division.

“Broadcom end-to-end 64G SAN technology is fueling storage innovation that will drive the industry for the next decade,” said Jack Rondoni, SVP and GM, storage networking division. “Solutions with Brocade switches and Emulex adapters set a new standard for application performance and management simplicity with 64G speed and autonomous SAN technology.“

“Broadcom is proud to deliver the industry’s first 64G optic, cementing our place as the innovation leader in performance and reliability-centric optical interconnects,” said Alexis Bjorlin, SVP and GM, optical systems division. “By providing 64G connectivity for Brocade switches and Emulex HBAs, we are able to power the world’s highest-performing storage networks.“

Improving performance of most SAN-based applications during testing, Emulex LPe36000-series 64G HBAs achieved following results:

Reduced Oracle data warehousing runtime by 87% compared to 32G⁽¹⁾
PCIe 4.0 demonstrated up to a 63% improvement in application performance for dual-port 64G HBAs compared to running in a PCIe 3.0 server ⁽¹⁾
Cuts storage migration times by up to 38% ⁽²⁾
Reduces VM Boot storm times by up to half⁽²⁾

“The combination of new PCIe 4.0 servers and AFAs demonstrate such high performance margins that they are now capable of consuming all the bandwidth that current storage networks can deliver,” said Kevin Tolly, founder, The Tolly Group, “The results of performance testing by Tolly Group demonstrate why all-flash storage arrays should be paired with 64G technology such as Emulex Gen 7 HBAs and Brocade Gen 7 switching.“

Emulex performance
Emulex HBA’s performance is made possible due to 10 million IO/s ⁽¹⁾, which is over 2x higher than previous gen and over 5x higher than the competition. Combined with an industry’s lowest latency HBA response time of t10µs, the company provides the performance required to utilize the latest PCIe 4.0 bus bandwidth which is double that of PCIe 3.0.

The LPe36000-series ships standard with NVMe/FC)drivers providing performance SAN connectivity and concurrent protocol support, empowering datacenters to transition to NVMe/FC without a fork-lift upgrade.

“We are seeing that data center customers continue to choose FC to power their mission-critical, highly-secure applications,” said Seamus Crehan, president, Crehan Research Inc. “The FC market remains strong, spearheaded by NVMe/FC, coupled with growing flash-based storage array deployments. We believe the market will adopt higher-performance 64G FC to further increase customer’s ROI on AFA purchases.“

LPe3500x/LPe3600x specifications

Introducing Emulex SAN Manager Version 1.2

Click to enlarge

Also announced, the Emulex SAN Manager version 1.2, which extends the company‘s autonomous SAN technology to server and storage end-points. It provides single pane-of-glass visibility into every host on the SAN, maximizing uptime by identifying degrading optics on end-points and pinpointing multi-pathing errors and mismatched firmware and driver pairings. Application performance is improved with automatic identification and mitigation of network congestion.