Emulex introduces Gen 5 Fibre Channel Flash Services

“Flash and cache technologies are driving tremendous opportunities to accelerate applications and maximise QoS for virtualised 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 prioritised queuing by using prioritisation 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 changes to 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 utilisation, 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 optimised 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 utilisation 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.

“EMC has a unique, differentiated strategy leveraging flash technology across the entire storage infrastructure. By working with Emulex to deliver customers 16GFC we are helping address the new demands of the data centre with flash technology,” said Barry Ader, Vice President, Product Marketing and Management, Server Storage Software, Emerging Technology Products Group, EMC Corporation. “Through this collaboration, EMC and Emulex are providing solutions that maximise application performance by reducing latency.”

“As businesses turn to virtualisation and the cloud to deliver flexibility, reliability and efficiency, Fusion ioMemory provides the low-latency performance needed to virtualise any application,” said Ajay Nilaver, Fusion-io Vice President of Products. “Emulex’s Gen 5 FC network optimisation technologies for flash help our joint customers maximise server density and eliminate I/O bottlenecks even in data-intensive virtual environments.”

“Effective flash solutions are important for today’s virtualised environments. Emulex’s new Gen 5 FC Flash Services technology, along with VMware vSphere® 5.5 and the VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache™, enable end users to use a software-defined storage architecture in their data center to improve quality of service and lower latency for mission-critical applications,” said Mike Adams, director, Cloud Infrastructure, VMware.

“Fibre Channel technology is still one of the best options for high-performance, rock-solid enterprise connectivity and the protocol continues to evolve to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprise environments,” said George Crump, lead analyst, Storage Switzerland. “Emulex, a long-time Fibre Channel technology leader, has developed a flash agnostic solution for enabling flash QoS on best-of-breed solutions with partners and OEMs’ in-house flash/cache products.”