EMC Qualifies Emulex FCoE CNAs

Emulex Corporation announced that its LightPulse LP21000 family of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) are qualified by EMC for use in storage area networks (SANs) using the new EMC Connectrix NEX-5020 — EMC’s first FCoE switch — and EMC CLARiiON, EMC Celerra and EMC Symmetrix networked storage systems. With this announcement, Emulex and EMC continue their long-standing history of delivering industry-leading solutions that enable customers to seamlessly deploy next-generation data center technologies, such as FCoE, while extending their existing investments in Fibre Channel infrastructure, management, training and processes to converged networks.

"The data center is undergoing a significant transformation driven by virtualization, consolidation and PCSC (power, cooling, space and cabling) concerns. Emulex is working closely with EMC to deliver FCoE-based solutions that address the needs of enterprise data centers," said Taufik Ma, vice president of product marketing, Emulex Corporation. "Today’s announcement, coupled with last week’s solidification of the FCoE standard in INCITS, marks the realization of a complete production-ready FCoE enabled network convergence solution."

The Emulex LP21000 family of CNAs provides customers with the ability to simplify their networking infrastructure, by consolidating Fibre Channel and networking traffic over a 10Gb/s Enhanced Ethernet network. Levering field-proven Fibre Channel SAN technology, Emulex CNAs allow companies to extend their Fibre Channel investments and retain existing management processes, while deploying a next-generation unified fabric in their data centers. The use of a common driver model and the HBAnyware management suite ensures that Emulex CNAs provide the same reliability, performance and manageability characteristics as Emulex’s enterprise-proven Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs). Emulex CNAs minimize data center complexity and enable lower operational costs by reducing the number of cards inside servers, network ports and cables by at least 50 percent.

"EMC leads the industry in deploying Fibre Channel-based SAN solutions and is working with key partners, such as Emulex, to deliver its first FCoE-based switch. FCoE provides an evolutionary approach to consolidated storage networking that will help address the immediate challenges our customers are facing in today’s enterprise data centers,"’ said Barbara Robidoux, EMC vice president, Storage Product Marketing. "Emulex CNAs are now EMC E-Lab(tm) tested; guaranteeing tight interoperability in SAN environments using EMC networked storage systems, so that customers can work toward achieving network consolidation in the data center, while protecting existing technology investments."

Emulex CNAs also support Emulex’s Virtual HBA technology with industry-standard N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), allowing customers to ‘virtualize’ SAN connections so that each virtual machine has independent access to its own protected storage. With NPIV, customers have the ability to track and chargeback storage utilization at the virtual machine level using Emulex’s HBAnyware management suite.

"Today’s certification by EMC extends the FCoE ecosystem and further broadens the availability of FCoE-based solutions to customers," said Jackie Ross, VP, Marketing, in Cisco’s Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit. "We are committed to helping our customers create next-generation data centers, and we expect to see rapid adoption of FCoE because it provides customers with immediate benefits in reduced cost, consolidated infrastructure and more agile business operations."

Emulex is a longstanding participant in the EMC Select program, which provides customers with a convenient, single source for the components of an information infrastructure. The Emulex LP21000 family of CNAs will be offered by EMC through EMC Select. In addition to Emulex FCoE CNAs, Emulex 2Gb/s, 4Gb/s and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs are also qualified for use with EMC CLARiiON, EMC Celerra and EMC Symmetrix networked storage systems.

For more information on Emulex LightPulse CNAs