Emulex 10Gb Ethernet and Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters Selected by Lenovo to Enhance ThinkServer Family

Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX), a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, today announced it is delivering high performance 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) and Gen 5 (16Gb) Fibre Channel (FC) connectivity for Lenovo ThinkServer tower and rack servers with the new OneConnect® OCe14000 family of 10GbE Ethernet Network and Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) and LightPulse® LPe16000 Gen 5 FC Host Bus Adapters (HBAs).

“This announcement represents our first Ethernet design win with Lenovo, and provides the infrastructure required for the demands of today’s data centers,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing, Emulex. “Our latest generation of Ethernet and Gen 5 Fibre Channel adapters are purpose-built to meet the performance capabilities and workload demands of Lenovo servers. Emulex OCe14000 adapters deliver increased throughput and reduce power consumption and operational expenditures, while addressing next generation workloads such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Hadoop and server virtualization.”

Emulex OneConnect 10GbE adapters and LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs offer flexible connectivity and the highest performance, and can be controlled, configured and managed from a single console using Emulex OneCommand® Manager, which consolidates all I/O on a single driver to reduce complexity and ensure stability.

Emulex OneConnect 10GbE Ethernet and Converged Network Adapters enable:

• Industry-leading Server Virtualization Density and Performance: Emulex OCe14000 adapters are the only connectivity solution to deliver consistent line rate throughput, up to 1.5 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) for block storage and hardware offloads that deliver superior CPU and power efficiency, resulting in the ability to increase the number of virtual machines (VMs) per server for Red Hat Linux 6.4, Windows Server 2012 R2 or VMware ESXi 5.5 environments.
• Reduced Data Center Operational Expenditures by Lowering Server Power Consumption: Emulex hardware offload technology can reduce power consumption by up to 50 watts for a typical 2 socket rack optimized server 1, which lowers the server power costs by up to 20 percent (based on average power consumption of 250 watts per a server).
• Optimized Application Performance with Low-latency Connectivity for Virtualization: Emulex has implemented RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), delivering high performance I/O with reduced latency to applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and targeted network functions such as VM mobility using Windows Server SMB Direct and Linux NFS protocols.
• A 4x Improvement in Packet Performance vs. Previous Generation Adapters: Emulex OCe14000 adapters deliver a 4x performance increase in small packet network performance1, vs. previous generation adapters, which is critical for transaction-heavy and clustered applications such as video content delivery, Web-scale applications and messaging applications.
• Secure and Scalable Cloud Deployments Using Software-defined Networking and Open Technology: Emulex OCe14000 adapters are designed to work with open and industry standard hardware, network virtualization and software environments, including OpenStack-based management and orchestration software, emerging network virtualization using Network Virtualization Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE) (used in Microsoft Hyper-V) and Network Virtualization and Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) (used in VMware NSX). Emulex is also providing 10/40GbE CNAs for the OpenCompute project supporting open and standards-based Web-scale data centers.

Emulex LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs enable:

• Superior Gen 5 Fibre Channel Connectivity: Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs deliver more than 1.2 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) on a single port2, the highest level of Fibre Channel adapter performance available today, and up to 6x greater IOPS per port than the previous generation, enabling better storage performance for cloud and storage intensive applications. Power efficiency is also improved by delivering up to 4x better IOPS per watt of power2.
• Higher Throughput and Low Latency: Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs provide twice the throughput and up to 75 percent lower latency when compared to current 8GFC adapters without sacrificing CPU efficiency2.
• Increased I/O Bandwidth with PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 Support: Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs support PCIe 3.0, which provides a faster I/O bus, more PCIe lanes and increased I/O bandwidth, enabling Emulex Gen 5 FC technology to provide optimal performance for applications, such as virtualization and database management systems, by matching the performance capabilities of server platforms based on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 V2 product family.
• Improved Quality of Service with Emulex Gen 5 Flash Services: Gen 5 Flash Services includes ExpressLane™, which provides Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities for flash/solid state disk (SSD)-based storage and Emulex CrossLink™, which provides in-band message passing between server nodes, delivering optimized performance using lossless, standards-based FC protocols.

“Our goal is to address the real-world IT needs of our customers’ business-critical workloads with enterprise-class, open industry-standard solutions that provide the ideal balance of performance and features, and ease-of-use and integration with our enterprise product offerings,” said Darrel Ward, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Product Group, Lenovo. “We are pleased to partner together to provide high performance Fibre Channel and 10GbE adapters that offer integrated ease-of-use with Lenovo ThinkServer tower and rack servers to our customers.”

Emulex OneConnect 10GbE Ethernet and Converged Network Adapters and LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs are now available for Lenovo ThinkServer TD340 tower, RD340/RD440 and RD540/RD640 rack servers. Visit the Lenovo web site for ordering information.

1. Based on Emulex Implementers Lab blog
2. Demartek Emulex LPe16000B 16Gb Fibre Channel HBA Evaluation, October 2012

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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 unrivaled end-to-end application visibility, optimization 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 centers of nearly all of the Fortune 1000. Emulex’s monitoring and management solutions, including its portfolio of network visibility and recording products, provide organizations 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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