For the last several months, there has been a lively debate in the industry about Emulex’s choice to use heat sinks on our 8Gb/s host bus adapters (HBAs). In contrast, QLogic, another market participant, chose not to put a passive cooling device on their HBA. But their decision can leave customers burned.
In today’s mission-critical data centers, customers demand the highest levels of reliability without compromise. But our competition has chosen to take shortcuts with their product that can have IT administrators seeing red, especially when it puts their environments at risk. At Emulex, we feel strongly that keeping our adapters cool in a broad range of server environments is critical to data center success. This is why we used heat sinks when we designed our family of 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs.
Heat sinks are not new to server environments. They are extensively used in blade, pedestal and rack mount servers to ensure proper operation. Heat sinks are applied on a server’s central processing unit (CPU), memory modules, power components and even networking devices (NIC). Since heat sinks are passive, with no moving parts, their inherent design has no negative impact on server reliability. In fact, their use can be considered as an additional safeguard to help improve server reliability. Vendors who properly understand the benefits of heat sinks leverage them to help maximize server performance and reliability.
To help visualize the dramatic difference between our implementation and that of the competition, Emulex Labs used a thermal camera to view both Emulex and QLogic’s HBAs. Our findings were that the Emulex LPe12002 HBA operates 27° F cooler than the QLogic QLE2562 HBA. The image on the below right shows the thermal “hot spots” on the QLogic QLE2562 HBA where higher temperatures were detected.
We even went a step further, removing the heat sink to demonstrate that the Emulex LPe12002 operated cooler than the competition. The images below clearly show that, even without a heat sink, the Emulex LPe12002’s I/O processor operated 10% cooler than QLogic’s.
You can download a flier that outlines the results of our evaluation:
Click to download
If you want to know more about the use of heat sinks, we invite you to watch this video of Charlie Nogalas, vice president of engineering at Emulex, who answers common questions on the use of heat sinks and the performance of our 8Gb/s HBAs.
Heat Sink Video with Charlie Nogales
Additionally , you can access a presentation that shows more detail on our thermal evaluations:
Click to download
Finally, we have provided an FAQ that will answer questions you might have on passive cooling and Emulex HBAs:
Click to download
At Emulex, we are focused on delivering high-quality solutions to our customers and partners without compromising performance or reliability. This means no short cuts! We closely scrutinize our product designs to ensure trouble free operation in real-world environments. By deploying heat sinks in our solutions, we are helping customers to improve data center reliability and keep their businesses running at full speed. With our 8Gb/s HBAs, you will not find a burning hole in your server, or in your wallet.
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