Emulex LightPulse 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs Certified for VMware Environments

By VSM News Staff
published: Monday, July 28 2008

Emulex Delivers Increased Bandwidth and Advanced Virtual HBA Technology to Support the Most Demanding, Mission-Critical Enterprise Application Environments.

Emulex HBA drivers are included with VMware ESX and ESXi, providing customers with a rigorously tested, fully supported configuration for even the most demanding enterprise application environments. Emulex LightPulse HBAs include advanced Virtual HBA technology with support for industry-standard N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), which allows customers to effectively “virtualize” SAN connections so that each virtual machine has independent access to its own protected storage. This provides a number of benefits, including the ability to track and chargeback the I/O throughput, storage traffic and utilization at the user and virtual machine level.

“Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs deliver significantly higher I/O performance to better accommodate increased storage networking traffic,” said Scott McIntyre, vice president, customer marketing, Emulex. “By providing greater bandwidth, Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs enable VMware customers to more fully realize the benefits of server virtualization, including higher processor utilization and lower power and cooling costs.”

“Improved shared storage connectivity is an important factor in realizing the full potential of VMware virtualized environments, enabling higher consolidation ratios and improved performance for business critical applications,” said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. “Emulex 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs are a great complement to the VMware platform, delivering increased I/O headroom and enabling customers to get better visibility into SAN utilization through support for features such as NPIV.”

Emulex and VMware have created a Best Practices Guide that provides data center users with practical use cases and deployment scenarios for maximizing the benefits of using Emulex Virtual HBA technology within a VMware environment. For more information, please visit http://www.emulex.com/white/hba/emulex-vmware-npiv-best-practice.pdf. Emulex is a VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program member and participant in the VMware I/O Vendor Program. For more information, please visit http://www.emulex.com/vmware/index.jsp. For more information on Emulex LightPulse® Fibre Channel HBAs, please visit http://www.emulex.com/products/hba/index.jsp.

About Emulex

Emulex Corporation creates enterprise-class products that intelligently connect storage, servers and networks. The world’s leading server and storage providers rely on Emulex’s award-winning HBAs, intelligent storage platforms and embedded storage products, including switches, bridges, routers and I/O controllers, to build reliable, scalable and high performance storage and server solutions. Emulex is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE:ELX) and has corporate headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. News releases and other information about Emulex Corporation are available at http://www.emulex.com.

Emulex Safe Harbor Statement

“Safe Harbor” Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: With the exception of historical information, the statements set forth above include forward-looking statements that involve risk and uncertainties. The company wishes to caution readers that a number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Those factors include the rapidly changing nature of technology, evolving industry standards and frequent introductions of new products and enhancements by competitors; fluctuation in the growth of Fibre Channel and IP markets; changes in economic conditions or changes in end user demand for technology solutions; fluctuations or delays in customer orders; the highly competitive nature of the markets for Emulex’s products; Emulex’s ability to gain market acceptance for its products; the company’s ability to attract and retain skilled personnel; the company’s reliance on third-party suppliers. These and other factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements are also discussed in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its recent filings on Forms 8-K, 10-K and 10-Q. All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.