Posted January 28th, 2010 by Emulex Labs Team
In the movie Avatar, there is a bad-boy pterodactyl-kind of creature that dominates the skies of the planet Pandora called the Mountain Banshee. Since he’s the biggest, strongest and meanest SOB in the skies, he fears no one. However, the hero of the movie, Jake Sully, takes an unorthodox perspective on how to approach this beast. It’s the ability to look at situations from new and different perspectives that give us those “ah-ha” moments in our lives.
That kind of moment happened at Emulex recently when Steve Reichwein, director of field marketing, made a figurative statement: “It’s so hot, you could fry an egg on it.” However, Steve wasn’t referring to the weather; he was making a statement about the QLogic Converged Network Adapter (CNA). After a momentary dead silence, Mark Jones, senior director of technical marketing, got to thinking: could you really fry an egg on it?
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Tags: environment, Heat, QLogic, Video
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Posted January 13th, 2010 by Emulex Labs Team
By now, most IT organizations have come to recognize that one of the benefits of network convergence is reduced network infrastructure hardware deployment costs. However, while the focus has been on cost savings through hardware consolidation at acquisition time, the ongoing management costs also need to be taken into consideration. While it’s true that in converged environments, network and storage traffic will travel on one physical infrastructure, they still need to be managed independently. Therefore, to truly leverage the benefits of converged environments, consolidation of management functions is critical. IT managers are already operating at maximum capacity; therefore, they need converged solutions that can help them streamline management within the data center.
A key component of converged networks is the Converged Network Adapter (CNA), which provides server to network connectivity. While there are various companies that make CNAs, Emulex is the only company that offers a Universal CNA (UCNA) with the flexibility to support Fibre Channel, iSCSI and network traffic. But this is only half the story…Emulex’s OneCommand™ Manager provides centralized administration of the UCNA, regardless of the traffic it has been configured to support. This significantly reduces the number of management applications an IT administrator must deal with. Instead of using a disjointed set of applications, Emulex unifies Host Bus Adapter (HBA), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), CNA and network interface card (NIC) management into a single application. This minimizes the learning curve associated with introduction of new management tools, reduces human errors that can occur when switching back and forth between applications and compounds management synergies between the data domains.
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Tags: Consolidation, Convergence, OneCommand, Software, Techology
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Posted January 8th, 2010 by Emulex Labs Team
Last year, Intel launched the Xeon 5500 processor series with its Nehalem microarchitecture. The combination of this next-generation processor and new platform architectures with new memory and I/O subsystems has delivered game-changing improvements in performance, virtualization and energy efficiency. And with research indicating accelerated ROI when upgrading to these new servers, data centers are replacing their old single-core servers with these high-performance multi-core servers that are available from all of the major server manufacturers, including Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel and Sun.
Here at Emulex Labs, we tested these new servers and were frankly quite impressed with their performance. Using our LightPulse 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs, a single two-socket server was able to generate over a million IOPS! Now that’s complementary technology ideal for I/O-intensive applications and virtualized server environments. So, we asked one of our resident technology gurus, Jon Krueger, to explain how customers can leverage the Xeon 5500 and our 8Gb/s Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) to achieve maximum performance and scalable virtualization.
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Tags: ChalkTalk, HBAs, intel, Xeon
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Posted October 6th, 2009 by Emulex Labs Team
What Is UEFI Anyway?
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is the new standard designed to replace BIOS and EFI for the purpose of meeting the increased performance demands of modern server platforms. UEFI is the specification that defines the new model for the interface between computer operating systems and platform firmware. The interface helps hand off control of the system for the pre-boot environment (that is, after the system is powered on but before the operating system starts) to an operating system, such as Windows or Linux. The interface consists of data tables that contain platform-related information, plus boot and runtime service calls that are available to the operating system and its loader. Together, these provide a standard environment for booting an operating system and running pre-boot applications.
UEFI is a community effort that is spearheaded by industry-leading computer vendors and has over 100 member corporations to date. The UEFI board members include: AMD, American Megatrends Inc, Apple Computer Inc, Dell, HP, IBM, Insyde, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft and Phoenix Technologies. UEFI-capable systems are already shipping, and many more are in development. During the transition to UEFI, most platform firmware will continue to support legacy (BIOS) booting as well to accommodate legacy-only operating systems.
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Posted September 17th, 2009 by Emulex Labs Team
The latest Dell’Oro forecast shows that the transition from 4Gb/s Fibre Channel to 8Gb/s Fibre Channel continues to progress. In 2009, Dell’Oro projects 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs to be around 8% of total ports shipped, but by 2010 this number is expected to climb to 33%.
In his July 30 Marketing Mantra Blog, Shaun Walsh offers eight reasons to make the switch from 4Gb/s to 8Gb/s Fibre Channel.
Part of the market shift is being driven by lower prices for 8Gb/s Fibre Channel. For example, this quarter, Emulex has been offering some pricing incentives that make the choice between 4Gb/s host bus adapters (HBAs) and 8Gb/s HBAs a no-brainer.
However, for those of you still on the fence, wondering what the benefit is of installing an Emulex LPe1200x 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBA when your infrastructure is still at 4Gb/s, Emulex Labs has a benchmark that you should read.
In this benchmark, Emulex used the Oracle Orion I/O calibration tool and the SwingBench load generator to profile an order entry and data warehousing workload. We used Emulex LPe12002 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs and compared them to Emulex LPe11002 4Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs with storage arrays that only support 4Gb/s port connections. With these benchmarks, 8Gb/s HBAs in 4Gb/s environments showed:
- Nearly double data warehousing throughput
- 15% greater IOPS
- 16% improvement in I/O latency
Click here for Benchmark Report.
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