Emulex Introduces 16Gb FC Flash Services

Emulex Corporation announced Gen 5 FC Flash Services technology which is designed to enhance the QoS, optimize I/O performance and increase ROI in IT environments using fabric-based flash arrays and server-based cache.

It’s built on existing FC industry standards, eliminating vendor lock-in, and includes exclusive ExpressLane and CrossLink features, which provide priority queuing and in-band FC message passing. it’s available as a no charge upgrade to currently shipping Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs and doesn’t require additional hardware purchases.

“Flash and cache technologies are driving tremendous opportunities to accelerate applications and maximize QoS for virtualized and cloud environments,” said Shaun Walsh, SVP marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “We are enabling best-of-breed solutions with partners’ and OEMs’ flash and cache products by ensuring that Emulex FC and FCoE (FCoE) products provide the highest IO/s, lowest latency, in-band device-to-device message-passing and intelligent automation.”

ExpressLane Feature
As flash storage is deployed into mixed storage environments or with hybrid storage arrays, the combination of data from rotating media and flash devices can cause congestion on the SAN, resulting in reduced performance and diminished ROI. ExpressLane gives high priority workloads more chances to transmit by tagging the associated LUN so that flash traffic receives precedence.

It offers:

• SLAs: Delivers prioritized queuing by using prioritization flags to identify priority traffic to the fabric, resulting in consistent performance and improved SLAs for individual I/Os.

• QoS: Public or hybrid cloud environments running mixed workloads can use it to alleviate congestion, reduce latency and improve throughput, ensuring that applications receive highest priority.

• Ease of Use and Management: The feature requires no changes to the existing FC environment and is turned on and off using OneCommand Manager.

CrossLink Feature
Flash-based infrastructures, especially caching solutions, require coordination between nodes. East-West traffic (servers communicating with servers) has increased with the use of technology such as vSphere vMotion cache migration, which requires constant coordination between server nodes. Current solutions (TCP/IP and UDP) suffer from connectivity issues between nodes, including latency issues, poor QoS, excessive host CPU utilization, and lack of coordination with other storage devices. This provides an in-band FC message passing solution that ensures storage device connectivity and delivers optimized performance using lossless, standards-based FC protocols.

It offers:

• Reliability: Leverages lossless FC, eliminating dropped packets and reducing the number of points of failure by staying in-band FC.

• Performance: The in-band message passing reduces latency and increases CPU utilization compared with UDP/IP by leveraging FC.

• OPEX : Reduces OPEX because it negates the need for two teams (storage administrators and network administrators) to jointly manage the environment.

“EMC has a unique, differentiated strategy leveraging flash technology across the entire storage infrastructure. By working with Emulex to deliver customers 16Gb FC we are helping address the new demands of the data center with flash technology,” said Barry Ader, VP, product marketing and management, server storage software, emerging technology products group, EMC Corporation. “Through this collaboration, EMC and Emulex are providing solutions that maximize application performance by reducing latency.”

“As businesses turn to virtualization and the cloud to deliver flexibility, reliability and efficiency, Fusion ioMemory provides the low-latency performance needed to virtualize any application,” said Ajay Nilaver, Fusion-io, Inc.‘s VP of products. “Emulex’s Gen 5 FC network optimization technologies for flash help our joint customers maximize server density and eliminate I/O bottlenecks even in data-intenstive virtual environments.”

“Effective flash solutions are important for today’s virtualized environments. Emulex’s new Gen 5 FC Flash Services technology, along with vSphere 5.5 and the vSphere Flash Read Cache, enable end users to use a software-defined storage architecture in their data center to improve QoS and lower latency for mission-critical applications,” said Mike Adams, director, cloud Infrastructure, Vmware, Inc.

“FC technology is still one of the best options for high-performance, rock-solid enterprise connectivity and the protocol continues to evolve to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprise environments,” said George Crump, lead analyst, Storage Switzerland, LLC “Emulex, a long-time FC technology leader, has developed a flash agnostic solution for enabling flash QoS on best-of-breed solutions with partners and OEMs’ in-house flash/cache products.”

The Gen 5 FC Flash Services technology will be included as part of OneCommand Manager for use with Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs and CFAs in the first quarter of 2014.