Delivering new levels of performance, scalability and investment protection

The Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter (CFFh) for IBM BladeCenter offers the benefits and flexibility of both virtual NIC and I/O convergence on a single end-to-end solution. The Virtual Fabric Adapter provides two physical Ethernet ports, supporting 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s traffic. Each physical 10Gb/s port can be divided into four virtual ports with bandwidth allocation in 100Mb/s increments to the maximum 10Gb/s per physical port. Based on the Emulex OneConnect™ technology, the adapter offers the fastest 10Gb/s performance in the industry. Future Entitlement upgrades can enhance adapter functionality with FCoE and iSCSI protocol support, delivering the industry’s first Universal Converged Network Adapter and a future-proof connectivity solution for IBM BladeCenter.

One Adapter to Manage All Workloads:
1Gb, 10Gb, Virtual NIC, IO Convergence

The Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter for IBM BladeCenter is based on the Emulex OneConnect™ Universal Converged Network Adapter (UCNA) platform and supports hardware offload and acceleration on a single chip for all major protocols. By using a common infrastructure for Ethernet and storage networks, data centers can reduce capital expense (CapEx) for adapters, switches and cables, and operating expense (OpEx) for power, cooling and IT administration.

The two port 10Gb adapter supports multiple virtual NIC (vNIC) functions:

• Each vNIC appears as an individual adapter to the operating system.
• Each vNIC can allocate bandwidth at increments of 100Mb.
• The adapter can connect to either 1Gb or 10Gb data center infrastructure.

Virtual Fabric for IBM BladeCenter for a Future-proof Data Center

IT managers can combine HS22 Blades, Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter, and the BNT Virtual Fabric Switch to enable the Virtual Fabric Solution for IBM BladeCenter and achieve a new level of data center consolidation, efficiency, flexibility and scalability. Data centers can leverage up to 10 Ethernet NIC and two Fibre Channel ports when they combine the Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter with the Ethernet ports on-board and Emulex’s LightPulse® 8Gb/s Fibre Channel CIOv Expansion Card in the optional slot, making it an ideal blade solution for VMware virtualized server environments, in which it is recommended to use multiple NICs for different traffic types. The BNT 10-port 10Gb Ethernet Switch Module recognizes the Virtual Network Adaptor and assigns bandwidth in increments of 100MB. The Switch Module is CEE/FCoE-enabled for upgradeability to converged infrastructures.