Emulex Adapters Target SDN, Hybrid Cloud

Emulex is looking to make it easier for organisations to run their virtualised data centres and cloud environments with a new family of network adapters and converged network adapters that are based on the latest generation of the Emulex Engine (EX) 100 series of I/O controllers.

The OneConnect OCe14000 family of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 40GbE adapters, aimed at enterprises, cloud providers and telecommunications companies, is designed to address the rapid changes occurring in data centres, from server virtualisation to hybrid clouds to software-defined networking (SDN).

Web-scale applications

The adapters can be scaled in three dimensions – from higher bandwidth to reduced latency to increased I/O operations per second (IOPS) – and are designed to address the range of workloads found in web-scale applications, virtualised environments and SDNs, according to Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development at Emulex. The new adapters come as Internet traffic continues to increase and the amount of data needing to be accessed and stored grows.

“It’s all about efficiency and workload management where we’re focusing a lot of our effort around these products,” Walsh told eWEEK.

The OCe14000 network adapters will allow for higher server virtualisation density, and will enable organisations to connect hybrid clouds to their virtual network fabrics, according to the company. In addition, Emulex is introducing an open API aimed at enabling SDN technology.

The OCe14000 adapters can increase the number of virtual machines (VMs) that can be supported on each server by leveraging more efficient hardware offload technology in VMware virtual environments, which offers up to 50 percent better CPU utilisation compared with standard NICs. Even more efficiency comes though the four-fold increase in small packet network performance for scaling transaction-heavy and clustered applications.

Secure cloud connectivity

Emulex officials said the company’s Virtual Network Exceleration (VNeX) enables fast and secure connectivity between hybrid clouds and virtual network fabrics, enabling greater movement of virtual workloads and support for Microsoft’s network virtualisation technology and VMware’s Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN). Using VNeX with Emulex’s RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)-based low-latency architecture helps accelerate application delivery, speeding up hybrid clouds by 30 percent and reducing application latency by 50 percent, according to the company. It also increases CPU efficiency by 50 percent.

Emulex’s new SURF open API is designed to ease implementation of SDN technology that leverages such industry standards as OpenStack and OpenFlow.

Emulex is offering five models of the 10GbE and 40GbE adapters in single- and dual-channel versions, and two more 10GbE converged network adapters, both of which are dual channel. The OCe14000 adapters can be ordered now, with shipments beginning later this quarter.

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Originally published on eWeek.