It’s a well know fact that blade servers have helped to introduce greater management efficiency and improve SAN availability through their modular architecture which simplifies replacement and re-provisioning of computing resources within the data center, with minimal business impact.
But did you know that the server to SAN connectivity device (ie: Fibre Channel HBA) you select for your blade servers can affect management efficiency and SAN availability. Over time, IT administrators have given little thought to the Fibre Channel HBA installed in servers. This is mainly due to reliable nature of the HBAs. However; such indifference can end up eroding the benefits afforded by blade server platforms.
The modular design of the blade architecture is intended to make server replacement and reallocation easy, with minimal re-configuration. If this is the intended objective of the blade architecture, then shouldn’t HBA designs be in-line with this objective?
The answer is an obvious “yes”, but not all HBA designs compliment the objective of the blade architecture. From a functional standpoint, they work, but that is where it ends!
Emulex on the other hand has taken a different design approach. Fully understanding the value proposition of the blade server architecture, Emulex engineers set out to design HBAs which complement the blade server architecture. A key feature of the Emulex HBA and mezzanine cards which set them apart from other vendors is the stateless hardware parameter setting feature, which saves adapter parameters and settings on the server OS rather than the adapter itself.
Emulex adapters store their parameter settings on the server OS, where as competitive solutions store their settings on the adapter itself. This enables IT administrators to redeploy Emulex solutions without introducing settings which are not optimized for use on a new server. This is especially important in blade server environments, where server and server components must have a stateless presence, facilitating their transportability within the blade server infrastructure. Emulex blade solutions provide this transportability and are the only adapters that are fully in-line with the blade server independent maintenance philosophy of HP’s Virtual Connect and IBM’s Open Fabric Manager blade management solutions.
So now you are saying to yourself, where would Emulex’s “stateless configuration architecture” be of relevance to my life as an IT administrator? Well, how about cost reduction, which ranks high on the list of most, if not all, IT organizations, “how can I maximize cost savings?”
Emulex’s “stateless configuration architecture” improves the speed at which servers can be deployed. IT administrators can pre-install driver and then when it comes time for deployment, simply install the adapter into the server and power it on. This helps improves management efficiency and cost by speeding up deployments. With competitive solutions, you would have to first install the server and then configure each and every adapter within the servers, as the configuration setting for these adapters are saved onto the adapter and not in the server environment.
Therefore with Emulex’s stateless hardware architecture, you can improve management efficiency and reduce costs. It’s that easy, it’s that simple! That is Emulex.
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