Integrating Ethernet and Gen 5 Fibre Channel

“The new integrated OCm14000 CNAs and LPm15004/LPm16002 FC AnyFabric adapters not only free up server space and reduce cabling and infrastructure requirements, but provide hardware offloads for FCoE, iSCSI and RoCE, further improving server utilisation and compute density,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing, Emulex. “The performance, scalability and management features of the ThinkServer I/O connectivity portfolio provided by Emulex align with the core target applications – data centre, research, cloud computing and virtualisation, and the core target workloads – compute-intensive, Hadoop, databases, enterprise virtualisation and big data analytics – of the next generation ThinkServer family, providing customers with the fastest I/O for their next generation data centre infrastructures.”

“The next generation ThinkServer family addresses today’s data centre architectures and business-critical workloads with enterprise-class, industry-standard solutions that provide the ideal balance of performance and features, flexibility and integration with our enterprise product offerings,” said Darrel Ward, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Product Group, Lenovo. “The Emulex connectivity portfolio for the next generation ThinkServer family, including the new AnyFabric adapters, frees up server space, offers flexible workload connectivity options and accelerates application performance.”

New Emulex I/O connectivity solutions align with the following key benefits of the next generation Lenovo ThinkServer family:
· Accelerated Application Performance: Lenovo ThinkServer CNAs support RoCE, which accelerates applications such as Microsoft SQL Server when using Windows Server SMB Direct, delivering application and storage acceleration through faster I/O operations. The Lenovo ThinkServer Gen 5 FC HBAs also improve application performance with up to 1.2 million I/O operations per second (IOPS)1, which is 20 per cent more than other Gen 5 FC HBAs, and up to 3x faster for Oracle databases and 2x faster for Microsoft SQL Server deployments.
· Improved Virtualisation Agility and Cloud Scale Networking: Lenovo ThinkServer CNAs include Emulex Virtual Network Exceleration™ (VNeX) technology which offloads the header encapsulation process of next generation overlay network protocols, simplifying virtual machine (VM) mobility and network scalability, while optimising server performance when compared to adapters without offload capabilities. Emulex VNeX technology allows customers to maintain CPU utilisation thresholds and reduce CPU usage fluctuations, while adding more workloads to each server in virtual networking environments.
· Increased Workload Scalability: Lenovo ThinkServer CNAs deliver up to a 4x boost in small packet network performance2, vs. previous generation adapters, which is critical to scale transaction-heavy and clustered applications and workloads such as telco, Web-scale and messaging.
· Flexible Workload Storage Connectivity with FCoE and iSCSI Offloads: The Lenovo ThinkServer CNAs support FCoE offload using the same enterprise-class Emulex drivers that work with Emulex LightPulse FC HBAs. The Lenovo ThinkServer CNAs also support iSCSI offload, providing performance that is superior to iSCSI solutions based on software initiators and standard NICs. Finally the Lenovo ThinkServer CNAs also have the ability to support TCIP/IP and iSCSI or FCoE offloads on the same port (i.e. concurrent storage).
· Simplified and Flexible System Management: Emulex enables seamless deployment of its AnyFabric adapters by integrating Emulex driver and firmware deployment into the Lenovo ThinkServer Deployment Manager. Additionally, Emulex adapters deliver integrated diagnostics and thermal monitoring for the Lenovo ThinkServer System Management tools ensuring high reliability.