LSI Selects Emulex FC Switches and FC-to-SATA Bridges

Emulex Corporation announced that LSI Corporation has selected its InSpeed SOC 422 Embedded Storage Switch and BR-2401 bridge products for use in the new LSI Engenio DE96900 high capacity disk enclosure.

This is the second-generation deployment of Emulex’s InSpeed switches and bridges within the LSI Engenio disk enclosure product line. The InSpeed SOC 422 and BR-2401 bridge are trusted, enterprise-proven storage components that provide Fibre Channel to Serial ATA (SATA) connections with the resilience, performance and RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) that external storage systems require.

“LSI’s deployment of our InSpeed switch and bridge products illustrate the dynamics in today’s market, where storage system providers are looking for ways to improve density, capacity and reliability, extending their investments in field-proven, resilient Fibre Channel back-end infrastructures,” said Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of business development, Emulex. “Emulex’s InSpeed embedded storage switches and bridges are trusted by top storage system providers, such as LSI, to deliver leading RAS and performance.”

The LSI Engenio DE6900 is a 4U, 19-inch rack-mountable drive enclosure capable of housing a total of sixty 3.5-inch low-cost, high-capacity SATA drives for a maximum capacity of 60TB in a single enclosure. It is an ideal solution for data archival, near-line data storage, backup and recovery applications, and high performance computing environments where efficient space utilization, reduced power consumption and advanced serviceability features are critical requirements. The disk enclosure utilizes Emulex’s InSpeed SOC 422 for its front-end Fibre Channel connectivity and the BR-4201 bridge for its SATA to Fibre Channel back-end.

“LSI selected the Emulex InSpeed switch and bridging technology for our latest Engenio disk enclosure based on the field-proven reliability and performance in other solutions that we offer,” said Ken Day, vice president of Engineering, Engenio Storage Group, LSI. “The integrated Emulex BR-2401 allows us to cost effectively attach large numbers of SATA drives in a dense, reliable Fibre Channel environment, enabling us to offer our customers lower cost storage per gigabyte and reduced power requirements, which are increasingly important in the current economic environment.”

Emulex has an installed base of more than 60 million embedded storage ports and its embedded technologies are used by the top storage OEMs. In addition, Emulex’s LightPulse HBAs are fully tested and supported for mission-critical Fibre Channel SAN connectivity across the entire line of LSI Engenio Storage Group products.