Emulex Delivers Third-Generation CNAs

Emulex’s third-generation, 10GbE OneConnect OCe11000 Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) are now available to the company’s channel partners. (Emulex has been shipping the core technology to its OEM partners for about six months.)

The adapters are based on the single-chip, dual-port BladeEngine 3 (BE3) controller, which was introduced in mid-2010.

The BE3 provides a 20% performance boost over the previous generation in terms of I/Os per second (IOPS), and contributes to a power consumption decrease of up to 25% on the OneConnect OCe11000 UCNA vs. previous generation adapters, according to Shaun Walsh, Emulex’s vice president of corporate marketing.

Emulex has not yet released performance figures for the OCe11000 CNAs.

The adapters provide hardware offload of 10GbE, iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) via the company’s vEngine technology.

Emulex’s UCNAs support SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization), which is now available with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. SR-IOV allows PCIe devices to appear as multiple physical devices, and increases the number of virtual machines (VMs) that can be supported. SR-IOV also offloads I/O functions from the hypervisor to host-based I/O controllers.

With the introduction of the OCe11000, Emulex also added a VMware vCenter Plug-In.

According to market researcher IDC, unit shipments of 10GbE adapters will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 94.5% through 2014. And according to an end-user survey conducted by IT Brand Pulse, server virtualization is the #1 driver behind adoption of 10GbE (cited by 34% of the survey respondents), followed by iSCSI (17%) and NAS (14%). About 8% of the respondents cited FCoE as a primary driver behind adoption of 10GbE.

Related article:

QLogic announces 10GbE NICs, CNAs (InfoStor)