http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=841823

ORLANDO, FL–(Marketwire - April 9, 2008) - BLADE Network Technologies, Inc. (BNT) announced today that it is teaming with Emulex Corp. and NetApp at Storage Networking World to showcase the industry’s first public demonstration of a blade server-based Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) unified fabric. The demonstration shows that the “loss-less” I/O required to carry Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) storage traffic within blade architectures is now possible using products based on the emerging standards for Converged Enhanced Ethernet™ (CEE), an enhanced version of Ethernet for data centers.

BLADE is working closely with Emulex and NetApp to deliver FCoE products that consolidate the number of networks in tomorrow’s data centers. The demonstration shows that BLADE’s CEE-capable 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, Emulex’s Converged Network Adapter products and NetApp Ethernet storage provide the loss-less I/O necessary to support FCoE in a blade server environment. BLADE is a pioneer in developing advanced high-performance Ethernet I/O infrastructure products and its CEE-capable switching products will enable widespread adoption of FCoE SANs and also greatly enhance Ethernet in the data center across a wide range of traffic types from networking and storage to clustering.

Very cool, any innovation in the Fibre Channel over Ethernet area has to be a good thing, the more vendors we have supporting the technology, the more innovation of the platform and choice for the consumer which has to be a good thing.