Demartek Estimates Emulex FC HBAs Superior to Brocade’s Products

Emulex Corporation announced the results of an evaluation report by Demartek, a firm specializing in independent analysis and lab validation testing, that compares Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) to competing solutions from Brocade. Demartek found that overall, Emulex HBAs are more feature-rich, are designed for more scalable management, provide broader support and have stronger performance than Brocade HBAs.
 
“Emulex has been delivering advanced Fibre Channel SAN connectivity solutions for more than a dozen years, and Demartek’s evaluation is evidence of our strength in providing industry-leading HBAs that offer the strongest performance, interoperability and backwards compatibility with existing and next-generation data center solutions,” said Mike Smith, executive vice president, worldwide marketing, Emulex. “Combining our experience, field-proven reliability and market strength makes Emulex LightPulse HBAs the clear choice for IT managers.”

Key highlights of the Demartek report include:

• Availability and Support: Emulex HBAs and drivers are qualified and supported by all the major server, operating system and storage vendors and are widely available through retail channels, whereas Brocade’s HBAs are only available through retail channels and offer very limited support.
• Installation: Installing the Brocade HBAs required two separate installation procedures and more interaction by the SAN administrator than with the Emulex HBAs. Overall, the installation process for both the HBA driver and management suite was easier for the Emulex HBAs and administrators in large–scale environments with many servers and HBAs will find that the Emulex approach simpler and easier.
• Performance: In a basic performance test using a HP DL585G2 server connected to a Texas Memory Systems RAMSAN storage device through a Brocade Silkworm 4100 Fibre Channel switch, the Emulex HBAs outperformed the Brocade HBAs for single- and dual-channel configurations for all block sizes.
• HBA Management: Emulex’s HBA management suite, HBAnyware, is more intuitive, streamlined and customizable than Brocade’s Enterprise Server Connectivity Manager (ESCM). Key differentiators include faster deployment (two steps vs. five), automatic initialization of local and remote hosts, automatic firmware updates with event log for ease-of-use and customizable driver parameters, largely unavailable in the Brocade ESCM.
• Multipathing Support: Emulex HBAs are certified to work with all the major multipathing solutions in the market today from server, storage and operating system vendors. Comparatively, Brocade HBAs do not have any major complete server-to-storage multipathing solution certifications.
• Reliability and Installed Base: Emulex has a proven HBA customer support center, an installed base of more than five million host server ports and more than 10 million hours of field mean time between failures. Brocade only began selling HBAs in September, 2007.

"Emulex’s breadth and depth of experience in Fibre Channel technology was obvious in this evaluation, as its HBAs proved to have broad industry reach, robust performance and proven reliability," said Dennis Martin, president, Demartek. "As companies evaluate SAN connectivity solutions, Emulex rises to the top of the list, especially for large-scale environments, as Emulex HBAs are easy to use, highly scalable and feature-rich."

Full evaluation results