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Emulex Provides 8Gb/s SAN Connectivity with HP ProLiant Servers and HP StorageWorks Arrays

Emulex offers a seamless migration to 8Gb/s Fibre Channel technology for HP SANs - The single-channel HP AJ762A (Emulex LPe12000) and dual-channel HP AJ763A (Emulex LPe12002) for Windows and Linux operating systems are compatible with 2, 4 or 8Gb/s Fibre Channel fabrics. Emulex works with SAN eco-system partners to ensure that its Fibre Channel HBA solutions for HP are fully certified and interoperable, eliminating compatibility concerns. The new 8Gb/s HBAs use the same drivers and management tools as other Emulex Fibre Channel HBAs, which streamlines driver qualification and allows for quick installation into existing servers. Emulex drivers are integrated with all major operating system releases and distributions for HP servers and are designed to be installed with minimal system reboots.

Emulex provides streamlined HBA management with the ability to manage thousands of HBAs on HP SANs, whether 2, 4 or 8Gb/s, from a single GUI-based management console, regardless of the operating system platform. The browser connectivity option offers flexible installation and operational options to efficiently support local and remote management paradigms and the CLI-based interface option provides greater management and automation flexibility. Common administrative activities such as firmware upgrades, diagnostics and parameter settings can be initiated across the entire SAN in seconds to meet the needs of the most demanding dynamic, enterprise-class SAN environments.

Today's IT professionals are challenged by ever increasing demand for application, server and storage resources in order to respond quickly to business requests. In addition, they are faced with resource constraints for floor space, power, cooling and the staff required to deploy and manage the data center efficiently and effectively.

To address these challenges, organizations are responding by implementing server virtualization. Emulex HBAs support virtual HBA technology, which provides the scalability necessary to support an increase in the number of applications running on virtualized servers, while leveraging existing SAN management tools and best practices, such as fabric zoning and LUN mapping/masking.

Additionally, Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs support Message-Signaled Interrupts eXtended (MSI-X), which is an interrupt handling mechanism in the PCI standard for today's multi-core and multi-processor servers. Recently, a record-level Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) benchmark was completed that demonstrated improved overall performance, reduced host CPU utilization and lower latencies.