Stories about: Emulex

This year's Storage Networking World Europe show focused attention on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). However, while SAN vendors promoted FCoE as a way to extend Fibre Channel's reach and longevity, skeptics described it as unnecessary -- and perhaps even a Cisco-powered Trojan horse intended to wipe out rival networking supplier Brocade Communications.

Even though strides are being made to define standards for extending Ethernet to handle data center applications, these advances will not be a panacea, vendors say.

EMC said Monday it will support a line of Emulex network adapters that use Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE), giving a big-name boost to an emerging technology that could become the common transport across an entire data center.

In a recent review, I consolidated FC and Ethernet networks using FCoE (fibre channel over Ethernet) and Cisco's new Nexus 5000 switch. As the review showed, the combination merged the two transport protocols easily, allowing FC frames to channel through a 10G connection without giving up features or performance.

Sun Microsystems is set to unveil Friday open source software that can repurpose any OpenSolaris-based x86 server into a block-based storage device capable of emulating the physical characteristics of a storage array.

Since the emergence of Fibre Channel SANs in the late 1990s, enterprise IT managers have maintained two sets of networks, one for storage I/O traffic and the other for data network traffic. But system consolidation and SAN expansion efforts are driving the need for a unified fabric where multiple traffic types -- network, storage and clustering -- are all carried over a single network infrastructure.

Storage Networking World came and went last week, and judging from the hype, FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) is coming out of the conference with a head full of steam.

Cisco this week announced plans to fully acquire a switch start-up it funded and also unveiled the newest member of its data center switching line, developed by Cisco and that start-up.

QLogic last week announced the availability of its 8Gbit/sec Fibre Channel switch and its companion 8Gbit/sec host bus adapter (HBA). QLogic's announcement followed one by Emulex last week, which released its LightPulse LPe12000 family of 8Gbit/sec HBAs.

During this week's launch of Windows Server 2008, storage vendors turned out in full force, including CA, FalconStor Software, Emulex, EMC, Network Appliance and QLogic.

Hitachi is bundling Diligent de-duplication software onto three virtual tape appliances and targeting them at mid to large sized data centers.