Emulex bring cost effiect 10GbE leveraging existing cable infrastructure

martin237 | February 7, 2012 | 0 Comments

Emulex.com

New Adapters Provide Cost-Effective 10GbE by Leveraging Existing Cabling Infrastructure

COSTA MESA, Calif., February 7, 2012 - Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX) today announced the availability of 10GBASE-T adapters as part of its next-generation Emulex OneConnect™ 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) Universal Converged Network Adapter (UNCA) family, providing 10GbE connectivity over twisted pair cables, reducing deployment costs, increasing deployment simplicity and delivering investment protection. The OCe11102-NT NIC and OCe11102-IT iSCSI adapters are ideally suited for data centres that are using twisted pair cabling and are transitioning from 1GbE to 10GbE infrastructure. For customers deploying 10GbE in their data centres today, the ability to use existing 10GBASE-T Cat 6a cabling versus optical cabling makes 10GbE performance less cost prohibitive, yielding a 37% savings.

“By expanding our 10GbE offerings with 10GBASE-T solutions, we’re now delivering 10x the performance at a fraction of the price of ten 1GbE NICs, lowering overall cost of deployment for 10GbE networking,” said Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing, Emulex. “Combined with solutions from our ecosystem partners, 10GBASE-T is now a reality and we anticipate it will contribute to the rapid acceleration of 10GbE market adoption.”

The OCe11102-NT NIC and OCe11102-IT iSCSI adapters include the following benefits and features:

Reduced Deployment Cost: With 10GBASE-T, Emulex is delivering 10GbE performance at half the cost per Gigabit of deploying 1GbE, including fewer switches, cables and adapters. Additionally, customers will receive power savings using fewer links.

Deployment Simplicity: Using industry-standard twisted pair cables, OCe11102-NT and OCe11102-IT adapters can be used with Cat 6 and Cat 6a network cabling already deployed in data centres today, and are backwards compatible with existing 1GbE Ethernet networks.

Optimised for Virtualised Environments: Emulex’s Universal Multi-Channel (UMC) capabilities enable IT managers to have switch independent NIC partitioning that enables multiple PCI functions for each OneConnect 10GbE adapter port, which can then be assigned to optimise virtual server deployments. A dual-port OneConnect 10GBASE-T adapter provides eight logical NICs, allowing the replacement of two quad-port 1GbE NICs with a single, lower cost 10GBASE-T card.

iSCSI over Data Centre Bridging (DCB): Emulex’s Enterprise iSCSI technology supports IEEE DCB standards that ensure consistent iSCSI performance over a converged, lossless Ethernet network. Using DCB, Emulex iSCSI adapters support bandwidth allocation between network and storage traffic groups to optimise use of a high-performance 10GbE infrastructure. For customers still using iSCSI over 1GbE, the OCe11102-IT adapter future-proofs deployments, making them 10GbE ready at a similar cost to 1GbE iSCSI HBAs.

Manageable I/O: By sharing a single driver model, Emulex I/O solutions can be controlled, configured and managed from a single console using OneCommand™ Manager. Consolidated management capabilities enable enterprise scalability with time-saving features that provide more than twice the adapter management functionality and take half the time to install and manage compared to other I/O solutions[1]. In addition, the OneCommand™ Manager plug-in for VMware vCenter™ lets users manage Emulex adapters directly from the vCenter console for reduced complexity and is the only adapter that integrates with VMware management tools.

An exciting announcement from Emulex about their new OCe11102-NT NIC and OCe11102-IT iSCSI adapters, I wonder if there will be blade equivalents to aid in consolidation projects, I’ll need to check out the Emulex site for more information. Anything Emulex and the other vendors can do to innovate their offering, and improve the accessibility of 10GbE has to be a good thing for the end user community and innovation if the infrastructure platform and it’s capabilities.