Second-Gen of Emulex LightPulse 16Gb FC HBAs

Emulex Corporation announced the availability of its second generation of LightPulse 16Gb FC HBAs).

The LPe16000B series of 16GFC HBAs are the only adapters on the market that offer PCIe 3.0 support to complement the latest Xeon processor E5-2600 product family-based server platforms, with 1.2 million IOPS on a single port(Demartek Emulex LPe16000B 16Gb FC HBA Evaluation, October 2012,) which is six times faster than current HBAs being offered by Emulex’s nearest competitor, and BlockGuard data integrity offload for enhanced data protection.

"16GFC products are ramping faster than expected, and adoption is being driven by greater virtual machine densities, SSDs and next generation PCIe 3.0 capable servers," said Shaun Walsh, SVP of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. "Emulex is leading the 16GFC HBA market with more than 76% revenue market share3 and by announcing its second generation of 16GFC HBAs before its primary competitor has even begun shipping its first 16GFC HBA."

Features and benefits of LPe16000B series include:

• Performance: LPe16000B HBAs deliver over 1.2 million IOPS on a single port, providing more than six times the IOPS, four times the power efficiency and over twice the data throughput of 8GFC HBAs, enabling improved asset utilization and the associated capital and operational expenditure savings. They provide the fastest FC connectivity available, making them the choice for connecting to today’s virtualized servers, fast SSDs, databases and next generation servers to FC SANs.
• PCIe 3.0 Support: They are the only FC (adapters on the market that support PCIe 3.0, which provides a faster I/O bus, more PCIe lanes and increased I/O bandwidth, enabling the LPe16000B HBAs to match the performance capabilities of server platforms based on the new Xeon processor E5-2600 product family. They HBAs are also backwards compatible with PCIe 2.0 and 4 and 8GFC infrastructures.
• BlockGuard Data Protection: 16GFC HBAs include BlockGuard technology which supports the T10 Protection Information (T10 PI) standard, providing enhanced data protection against silent data corruption. They also include performance, hardware offload of data integrity checks, eliminating the 30% performance penalty of software-enabled T10 PI.4
• Simplified and Time-Saving I/O Management: With a single driver model, the 16GFC HBAs can be controlled, configured and managed from a single console using Emulex OneCommand Manager, enabling enterprise scalability with time-saving features that provide more than twice the adapter management functionality and take half the time to install and manage compared to other I/O solutions (based on Emulex Labs Benchmark Testing.)

"Emulex continues to address customers’ evolving architectures by offering the performance, management and security characteristics needed to support virtualized servers, especially those with high VM densities, SSD and flash-based storage and cloud deployments taking root in the enterprise," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "The new Emulex LPe16000B HBAs provides significant improvements over what was already a very impressive 16Gb FC adapter."

"The dramatic increase in the data-flow through datacenters is driving the need for PCIe 3.0 technology," said Jim Pappas, director of Technology Initiatives, Intel Corp. "PCIe 3.0 capable products such as Emulex’s LPe16000B HBAs provide the increased I/O bandwidth required to match the performance capabilities of server platforms based on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family."

Emulex’s LPe16000B single and LPe16002B dual-port 16GFC HBAs will be available this quarter.