… Emulex Supporting New Cisco Nexus Switches, Nexus and MDS Multihop FCoE Modules …

Emulex Corporation announced that its OneConnect 10GbE Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) and LightPulse 8Gb/s Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) support the enhanced Cisco Systems, Inc.‘s Data Center Fabric.

“Cisco continues to help drive network convergence in the data center, particularly with new director-class, multihop FCoE capabilities that will bring convergence to life for more enterprises today,” said Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing, Emulex. “Leveraging Emulex connectivity within the enhancements offered by Cisco’s Data Center Fabric help enable customers to take advantage of the high-performance connectivity they’re accustomed to, while protecting existing infrastructure investments.”

Cisco continues to tightly integrate Unified Computing, Unified Fabric, and Unified Network Services into the holistic Cisco Data Center Fabric designed to be simple, scalable and secure, delivering any application across any location, within the data center, across data centers, or to the cloud.

Cisco Unified Fabric delivers network management convergence and ‘wire once’ agility from the server to the storage array for physical and virtualized environments. Emulex connectivity solutions are supported across the following enhanced technology innovations components of the Cisco Data Center Fabric, a tightly integrated, flexible, high-performance, highly secure, shared infrastructure:

• OneConnect UCNA support for Cisco Nexus 7000: Emulex OneConnect UCNAs support Cisco Nexus 7000 Series, Cisco’s Ethernet Storage Director that now provides Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support for the first time. Emulex OneConnect adapters offer multiprotocol support and hardware offload, which removes the overhead from the CPU and helps enable more virtual machines (VMs) per server.
• OneConnect UCNA and LightPulse 8Gb/s HBA support for Cisco Nexus 5500: Emulex provides support for the enhanced Cisco Nexus 5500 fixed switches, enabling flexibility for customers to leverage their existing SAN connectivity investments, and utilize Emulex OneConnect UCNAs for protocol-agnostic connectivity. With Unified Ports, a multiprotocol universal port design, customers now have the flexibility to use either an HBA or UCNA adapter to meet their data center needs.
• Support for Adapter FEX and VM FEX within Cisco Nexus 5548UP and 5596UP Switches: Emulex also plans to support the new AdapterFEX and VM FEX functionality across the new Cisco Nexus 5548UP and 5596UP Switches. AdapterFEX helps enable partitioning of a physical server NIC into multiple logical NICs, while VM FEX offers these capabilities to virtual machines.
• OneConnect UCNA support for enhanced Cisco MDS 9000 switches: Emulex UCNAs support the new MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches. FCoE Module, which offers increased bandwidth and seamless interoperability with the Nexus platform, while bridging Converged Networks to FC SANs.
• Broad management support across Cisco Nexus and MDS switches: Emulex OneCommand Management Framework help enable IT managers to manage their adapters across any platform. Leveraging open APIs, the Emulex OneCommand Management Framework supports the new converged management solution from Cisco, for a ‘single pane of glass’ view into data center connectivity.

“Cisco, together with our technology partners, are arming customers with a powerful, flexible, cloud-ready infrastructure enabling the next-generation data center,” said Jackie Ross, vice president of Marketing, Server Access and Virtualization Technology Group for Cisco. “Emulex’s comprehensive portfolio of adapters are the multiprotocol ‘glue’ connecting servers to the network and the network to storage arrays.”

Emulex OneConnect UCNAs provide optimized 10GbE network performance with Emulex vEngineTM technology. Emulex vEngine technology offers hardware protocol offload support for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), iSCSI and FCoE and optimizes virtualized servers with support for virtual queues, multiple NIC PCI functions and emerging Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) standards. This results in 20% more virtual machines (VMs) per server to optimize infrastructure investment.

Emulex LightPulse 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs offer the throughput, scalability, and reliability necessary for I/O intensive applications and high-density virtual server environments. Emulex LightPulse HBAs offer common drivers and virtual HBA technology based on industry-standard N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), which provides VMs 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.

The Emulex LightPulse and OneConnect families of storage and network adapters are available across a wide portfolio of Cisco solutions, offering interoperability and management support.

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