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In my briefing with Emulex, during the last Powering the cloud event, was with Shaun Walsh, SVP Marketing & Corporate Development, Emulex.

Was an interesting extension of the previous meeting with SNIA and FCIA to see how Emulex is approaching the FC storage world. To be honest they are working also hard in the Ethernet and traditional network world, but the core remain the FC world.

Emulex does not require too much introdution: the Company’s I/O connectivity offerings, including its line of ultra high-performance Ethernet and Fibre Channel-based connectivity products, have been designed into server and storage solutions from leading OEMs, including Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, NetApp and Oracle, and can be found in the data centers of nearly all of the Fortune 1000.

During the event, they have announced a new Gen 5 Fibre Channel (FC) Flash Services technology, which is designed to enhance the quality of service (QoS), optimize I/O performance and increase return on investment (ROI) in IT environments using fabric-based flash arrays and server-based cache.

Emulex Gen 5 FC Flash Services technology is built on existing FC industry standards, eliminating vendor lock-in, and includes exclusive features:

  • ExpressLane™: this technology delivers prioritized queuing by using prioritization flags to identify priority traffic to the fabric, resulting in consistent performance and improved SLAs for individual I/Os, without require any changes to the existing Fibre Channel environment.
  • CrossLink™: provides an in-band FC message passing solution that ensures storage device connectivity and delivers optimized performance using lossless, standards-based FC protocols.

Also Emulex and Brocade have worked together to integrate Brocade’s ClearLink diagnostics technology into Emulex LightPulse® Gen 5 FC Host Bus Adapters.

In the storage world, SSD and Flash are changing also the SAN network requirements and FC Gen 5 is addressing most of them.

See also: full report list of Powering The Cloud 2013 event.

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.