Emulex Drives Gen 5 Fibre Channel Deployments with Adoption by Key Ecosystem Partners

COSTA MESA, Calif., Dec. 17, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX), a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, today announced that more ecosystem partners have certified its LightPulse® Gen 5 (16Gb) Fibre Channel (FC) Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) for  flash storage, backup and security solutions, further extending the Gen 5 FC ecosystem. ATTOTechnology, Bloombase, Imation, Permabit and Violin Memory have certified Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs with their solutions, enabling the most scalable, highly responsive solutions to accelerate applications, virtualization and I/O-intensive applications. Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs deliver increased storage area network (SAN) reliability, and management and consolidation simplicity, as well as application acceleration and higher throughput for virtualization, flash storage and mission-critical applications.

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"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 centers," 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 optimized solutions that provide massive I/O operations per second (IOPS) support and ultra-low FC latency, while accelerating applications and maximizing 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 port². 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, virtualized, backup and recovery applications.
• Bloombase: Bloombase delivers application-transparent data at-rest encryption security for next-generation data centers. 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^TM E-Series^TM 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 optimization 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 utilize either traditional hard disk drive (HDD) or flash-based storage.
• Violin Memory: Violin Memory flash Memory Arrays accelerate business critical applications and enable fully virtualized and optimized 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.

Supporting Quotes:
ATTO Technology
"Fibre Channel is the primary storage technology that scales from small-to-medium (SMB) through enterprise applications," said Wayne Arvidson, vice president of marketing, ATTO Technology. "Certifying Emulex LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs for use with our FastStream, FibreBridge and FibreConnect products gives customers a complete enterprise storage infrastructure, perfect for workgroup to data center environments, with the highest reliability, performance and lowest latency in the market."

Bloombase
"Customers look to Bloombase to secure their business-sensitive data at-rest in virtual data centers, big data analytics, and private cloud storage with transparent encryption as the last line of defense against data breaches," said Sean Xiang, CEO, Bloombase. "By utilizing Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs and Bloombase StoreSafe, customers can achieve blazing fast performance and unprecedented confidentiality for assets stored on Fibre Channel SANs."

Imation
"As our Nexsan E-Series customers scale their backup, virtual and cloud environments, they can benefit from the increased performance the Emulex LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs offer," said Mike Stolz, vice president of marketing and technical support for Imation's Nexsan solutions, Imation. "This performance boost enhances the IT environment for Nexsan E-Series customers, helping to optimize their storage arrays for high capacity operation."

Permabit
"Emulex's high performance, low latency Gen 5 FC HBA is ideally suited to Permabit's ready-to-run Albireo Virtual Data Optimizer that provides deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning capabilities," said Mike Ivanov, vice president of marketing, Permabit. "By combining these leading products, SANs can achieve inline data reduction without impact to throughput or latency, resulting in dramatic cost reduction."

Violin Memory
"Performance is very important to Violin Memory," said Narayan Venkat, vice president of product management, Violin Memory, "Emulex's Gen 5 FC HBAs were a key element of our product demonstration of the Violin Memory 6000 Series flash Memory Arrays that resulted in more than 2 million IOPS at this year's VMworld trade show."

1. Dell'Oro Group Adapter and Vendor Share Tables, 3Q13, November 2013
2. Demartek Emulex LPe16000B 16Gb Fibre Channel HBA Evaluation, October 2012

Resources:

• Read our Emulex Labs blog on today's news here.
• Learn more about Emulex Gen 5 FC technology here.
• Follow Emulex on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/emulex

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To learn more about Emulex, please visit: http://www.emulex.com

About Emulex
Emulex, a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, provides hardware and software solutions for global networks that support enterprise, cloud, government and telecommunications. Emulex's products enable unrivalled end-to-end application visibility, optimisation and acceleration. The Company's I/O connectivity offerings, including its line of ultra high-performance Ethernet and Fibre Channel-based connectivity products, have been designed into server and storage solutions from leading OEMs, including Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, NetApp and Oracle, and can be found in the data centres of nearly all of the Fortune 1000. Emulex's monitoring and management solutions, including its portfolio of network visibility and recording products, provide organisations with complete network performance management at speeds up to 100Gb Ethernet. Emulex is headquartered in Costa Mesa, Calif., and has offices and research facilities in North America, Asia and Europe. For more information about Emulex (NYSE:ELX) please visit http://www.Emulex.com.

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