Providing Industry-Leading Performance and Advanced Data Integrity for I/O Intensive Environments Running SSD/Flash Storage, Server Virtualisation and Oracle Databases

ORACLE OPENWORLD 2012, SAN FRANCISCO and COSTA MESA, Calif, October 1, 2012 – Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX) today announced the availability of its second generation of LightPulse® 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapters (HBAs). The LPe16000B series of 16GFC HBAs are the only adapters on the market that offer PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 support to complement the latest high performance Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 product family-based server platforms, industry-leading 1.2 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) on a single port,[1] which is six times faster than current HBAs being offered by Emulex’s nearest competitor,[2] and BlockGuard™ data integrity offload for enhanced data protection.

“16GFC products are ramping faster than expected, and adoption is being driven by greater virtual machine densities, solid state disks (SSDs) and next generation PCIe 3.0 capable servers,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “Emulex is leading the 16GFC HBA market with more than 76 per cent revenue market share[3] and by announcing its second generation of 16GFC HBAs before its primary competitor has even begun shipping its first 16GFC HBA.”

Key features and benefits of the new Emulex LPe16000B series of 16GFC adapters include:

    Market-Leading Performance: Emulex LPe16000B HBAs deliver over 1.2 million IOPS on a single port, providing more than six times the IOPS, four times the power efficiency and over twice the data throughput of 8GFC HBAs,[1] enabling improved asset utilisation and the associated capital and operational expenditure savings. Emulex LPe16000B HBAs provide the fastest FC connectivity available, making them the ideal choice for connecting to today’s heavily virtualised servers, lightning fast SSDs, growing databases and next generation servers to FC storage area networks (SANs).

    PCIe 3.0 Support: The LPe16000B HBAs are the only Fibre Channel (FC) adapters on the market that support PCIe 3.0, which provides a faster I/O bus, more PCIe lanes and increased I/O bandwidth, enabling the LPe16000B HBAs to match the performance capabilities of server platforms based on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family. The LPe16000B HBAs are also backwards compatible with PCIe 2.0 and 4 and 8GFC infrastructures.

    Exclusive BlockGuard Data Protection: Emulex 16GFC HBAs include exclusive BlockGuard technology which supports the T10 Protection Information (T10 PI) standard, providing enhanced data protection against silent data corruption. The LPe16000B HBAs also include high performance, hardware offload of data integrity checks, eliminating the 30 per cent performance penalty of software-enabled T10 PI.[4]

    Simplified and Time-Saving I/O Management: With a single driver model, the Emulex 16GFC HBAs can be controlled, configured and managed from a single console using Emulex OneCommand® Manager, enabling enterprise scalability with time-saving features that provide more than twice the adapter management functionality and take half the time to install and manage compared to other I/O solutions.[3]

“Emulex continues to address customers’ evolving architectures by offering the performance, management and security characteristics needed to support virtualised servers, especially those with high VM densities, SSD and flash-based storage and cloud deployments taking root in the enterprise,” said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “The new Emulex LPe16000B HBAs provides significant improvements over what was already a very impressive 16Gb Fibre Channel adapter.”

“The dramatic increase in the data-flow through datacentres is driving the need for PCIe 3.0 technology,” said Jim Pappas, director of Technology Initiatives, Intel. “PCIe 3.0 capable products such as Emulex’s LPe16000B HBAs provide the increased I/O bandwidth required to match the performance capabilities of server platforms based on the new Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 product family.”

Emulex’s LPe16000B single and LPe16002B dual-port 16GFC HBAs will be available this quarter. For more information, please visit our 16GFC solution page.

[1] Demartek Emulex LPe16000B 16Gb Fibre Channel HBA Evaluation, October 2012
[2] HBA Comparison Table
[3] Crehan Research, Server-class Adapter and LOM Market Share Report, 2Q 2012
[4] Based on Emulex Labs Benchmark Testing

Tweet This: Emulex Announces Performance Optimised #16GFC HBAs w PCIe 3.0 Support at @OracleOpenWorld: http://bit.ly/OSIbAC #PCI3.0 #oow12

Read the Demartek Emulex LPe16000B 16Gb Fibre Channel HBA Evaluation, October 2012

Read the ESG Product Brief - Emulex Targets High Performance Environments with LPe16000B, October 2012

Read the Emulex Labs blog on today’s news here.

Follow Emulex on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/emulex

Learn more about Emulex: http://www.emulex.com/