In August of this year, Emulex Labs highlighted the cool advantage our 8 Gigabit Per Second (8Gb/s) host bus adapters have over the other guys. (See: Sometimes being hot isn’t so cool) An Emulex HBA was tested against a QLogic adapter and it was demonstrated that “the Emulex LPe12002 HBA operates 27° F cooler than the QLogic QLE2562″. QLogic got wind of the issue, so months later, they decided they should get inline with Emulex and put a heat sink on their Quad Port 2564 HBA and we believe they need to put them on their 2562 Dual Port cards as well. But what have we known since high school? You can copy the guy who was cool, but that still doesn’t make you cool.
Emulex has always understood cool. After getting the “picture”, QLogic came around…eventually. (See Market Mantras: QLogic’s Cool HBA Technology Gets Some New Bling… a Heat Sink).
Why is being a “cool adapter” so important? If you have to pay the electric bill for your data center, then you know why. Ideally, data centers need more computing power in less space, using less electricity, generating less heat and delivering more performance.
Take, for example, a customer asking you for a Dell solution to install a virtualized operating system environment onto their servers. A great Dell server choice is the Dell PowerEdge R710.
As the customer can’t expand the data center floor space, they need to add Dell servers to connect up to an existing Storage Area Network (SAN) and they explain that the lab HVAC systems are already working to capacity. They want fast, virtualized and cool. Take the Dell PowerEdge R710 and install an Emulex LPe12002 HBA.
What are highlights of the Emulex LPe12002 HBA?
- Rocket fast 8Gbp/s performance, with a massive bandwidth pipe to handle heavy virtualized I/O loads.
- Enhanced virtual machine performance, using Emulex’s vEngine technology. This allows our adapters’ hardware to offload the networking protocol from the server CPU – increasing per CPU IO performance.
- It’s been cooler from the beginning. Emulex has been employing industry standard cooling practices since its initial release of the LPe12002 HBA. We know how to help keep the HVAC guys happy.
Why not use my existing 4 Gig solutions?
Revenge of the Nerds – that’s why. Emulex thought about this too. Check out “Market Mantras: Are There Eight Reasons to Move to 8Gb/s Now?“
What if I have a 4Gbp/s target array? How is my Dell Server going to take advantage of that with an 8Gbp/s Host Bus Adapter?
Answer: Switch things up. You can connect your Dell R-710 server to an 8Gbp/s switch. Dell offers many SAN solutions for this. That 8Gbps switch can take connections from the Dell R710 with an Emulex LPe12002 8Gbp/s link. From the switch you connect up multiple 4Gbp/s links to the Storage Area Network. In this way you are “Fanning In” multiple 4Gbp/s links and the aggregate bandwidth is going to overwhelm a 4Gbp/s Host Bus Adapter connected to the same switch. A 4Gbp/s “pipe” connected to a SAN in this way cannot possibly handle the same about of bandwidth that an 8Gbps pipe can.
You can achieve dramatic performance improvements by putting an 8Gbp/s solution into an existing 4Gbp/s data center.
There is much more to talk about in this Dell/Emulex SAN story. I look forward to continuing to grow our technologies together. Talk to you soon!
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