Emulex drives Gen 5 Fibre Channel

“The growth of data and the increased density of virtual environments continue to drive the need for increased storage performance via higher bandwidth and faster, low latency I/O. Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs tightly match the needs of today’s demanding data centres,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “Continuing to partner with technology leaders such as ATTO, Bloombase, Imation, Permabit and Violin Memory extends the Gen 5 FC ecosystem with optimised solutions that provide massive I/O operations per second (IOPS) support and ultra-low FC latency, while accelerating applications and maximising quality of service (QoS).”

Emulex partners continue to certify Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs as the most widely deployed HBAs by OEMs[1]. Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs enable up to 20 percent more IOPS than other Gen 5 FC HBAs, plus lightning-fast response times with more than 1.2 million IOPS on a single port[2]. New Gen 5 Flash Services technology, which enables ExpressLane™ and CrossLink™ features, provide priority queuing and in-band FC message passing, available as a no-charge upgrade to currently shipping Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs, enabling QoS and performance for mission-critical workloads running in flash arrays and server-based cache environments.

Partners have certified Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs for flash storage, backup and security deployments in the following ways:
· ATTO Technology: ATTO provides end-to-end solutions to help customers better store, manage, and deliver their data. ATTO has certified the Emulex LPe16000 Gen 5 FC HBAs with its FastStream storage controllers, FibreBridge 6500 bridge and FibreConnect 8GFC and 16GFC switches, providing low latency, guaranteed bandwidth for time-sensitive applications, streaming media, virtualised, backup and recovery applications.
· Bloombase: Bloombase delivers application-transparent data at-rest encryption security for next-generation data centres. Bloombase has certified the Emulex LPe16000 Gen 5 FC HBA in servers with Bloombase StoreSafe, an all-in-one storage security software appliance to lock down sensitive enterprise data stored in SAN for any business applications from ERP, content management, and big data analytics, with the least infrastructure change.
· Imation: Imation's Nexsan™ E-Series™ SAN storage system is an ultra-reliable, high-density, high performance, efficient storage array that enables lower storage costs, maximum storage uptime, and data storage ROI boosts for most any environment -- whether traditional, virtual or cloud. Imation has certified the Emulex LPe16000 Gen 5 FC HBAs with the Nexsan E-Series storage system so that customers can benefit from increased bandwidth, IOPS and reduced latency.
· Permabit: As a leader in data efficiency technology, Permabit delivers Albireo, an embedded high performance OEM data optimisation software to storage, application, and integrated IT vendors. Permabit has certified the Emulex LPe16000 Gen 5 FC HBAs with Albireo, which enables storage vendors to deliver high speed data deduplication for primary, archive or backup storage tiers that use either traditional hard disk drive (HDD) or flash-based storage.
· Violin Memory: Violin Memory flash Memory Arrays accelerate business critical applications and enable fully virtualised and optimised IT infrastructures. Designed for sustained performance with high reliability, Violin flash Memory Arrays scale to hundreds of terabytes and millions of IOPS with low, sub-millisecond spike-free latency. Violin Memory has certified the Emulex LPe16000 Gen 5 FC HBAs as initiators against its 6000 Series flash Memory Arrays. This configuration was used in the recently published Storage Switzerland report on designing a two million IOPS architecture.