Emulex Introduces Gen 5 FC Flash Services 

Emulex Corporation today announced 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 ExpressLane and CrossLink features, which provide priority queuing and in-band FC message passing. Emulex Gen 5 FC Flash Services technology is available as a no charge upgrade to currently shipping Emulex Gen 5 FC Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and doesn't require any additional hardware purchases.

"Flash and cache technologies are driving tremendous opportunities to accelerate applications and maximize QoS for virtualized and cloud environments," said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. "We are enabling best-of-breed solutions with partners' and OEMs' flash and cache products by ensuring that Emulex FC and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) products provide the highest I/O operations per second (IOPS), lowest latency, in-band device-to-device message-passing and intelligent automation."

ExpressLane Feature

As flash storage is deployed into mixed storage environments or with hybrid storage arrays, the combination of data from rotating media and flash devices can cause congestion on the Storage Area Network (SAN), resulting in reduced performance and diminished ROI. Emulex ExpressLane gives high priority, mission-critical workloads more chances to transmit by tagging the associated Logical Unit Number (LUN), so that flash traffic receives precedence. Emulex ExpressLane technology offers:

• Improved Service Level Agreements (SLAs): ExpressLane 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.   -- Improved QoS: Public or hybrid cloud environments running mixed workloads can use ExpressLane to alleviate congestion, reduce latency and improve throughput, ensuring that key applications receive highest priority.
• Ease of Use and Management: The ExpressLane feature requires no changesto the existing Fibre Channel environment and is easily turned on and off using OneCommand Manager.

CrossLink Feature

New flash-based infrastructures, especially caching solutions, require coordination between nodes. East-West traffic (servers communicating with servers) has increased significantly with the use of technology such as VMware vSphere vMotion cache migration, which requires constant coordination between server nodes. Current solutions (TCP/IP and UDP) suffer from connectivity issues between nodes, including latency issues, poor QoS, excessive host CPU utilization, and lack of coordination with other storage devices. Emulex CrossLink provides an in-band FC message passing solution that ensures storage device connectivity and delivers optimized performance using lossless, standards-based FC protocols. Emulex CrossLink technology offers:

• Increased Reliability: CrossLink technology leverages lossless FC, eliminating dropped packets and significantly reducing the number of points of failure by staying in-band FC.
• Improved Performance: The in-band message passing in CrossLink significantly reduces latency and increases CPU utilization compared with UDP/IP by leveraging FC.
• Reduced Operational Expenditures (OPEX): CrossLink technology reduces OPEX because it negates the need for two teams (storage administrators and network administrators) to jointly manage the environment.