COSTA MESA, Calif., Aug. 8, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX) today announced plans to deliver an 8Gb/s product family that provides enterprise-class end users with the ability to seamlessly transition to next-generation Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs). The new 8Gb/s PCI Express-based product family, including Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and an Embedded I/O Controller (IOC), is designed to offer industry-leading security, data integrity and virtualization features, while maintaining backward compatibility with existing 4Gb/s and 2Gb/s Fibre Channel SANs. The Emulex LightPulse(r) HBAs are equipped with a Service Level Interface (SLI(tm)), which enables driver compatibility across all generations of Emulex HBAs. Additionally, its speed matching capabilities allow IT administrators to seamlessly integrate 8Gb/s connectivity into existing Fibre Channel SANs.
"Our customers, including more than 95 of the Fortune 100 companies, operate in complex and expanding storage environments," said Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing, Emulex Corporation. "When customers migrate to next-generation data centers, they'll experience a seamless transition, leveraging the same drivers and management applications, thereby reinforcing the Emulex value proposition. Already, our 8Gb/s products have achieved OEM design wins on multiple platforms."
Emulex is once again validating its market leadership by being first to announce its 8Gb/s products, including the new LPe12000 family of HBAs, custom mezzanine cards for server blades and an 8Gb/s Embedded I/O Controller (IOC), the Emulex IOC 540. Emulex's 8Gb/s product prototypes are currently undergoing development testing and the company will begin delivering samples to OEMs for qualification this quarter.
"Consolidation of assets through server and storage virtualization as well as multi-core and bladed servers is a key mantra for today's IT executive," noted Richard Villars, vice president of storage system research at IDC. "With this concentration of server and storage assets, the delivery of 8Gb/s Fibre Channel infrastructure solutions like those being introduced by Emulex will be critical in ensuring adequate network capacity for tomorrow's data centers."
The new family of 8Gb/s Fibre Channel products offer enterprise scalability, manageability, interoperability and reliability. The new products are designed to provide the performance and increased network bandwidth required by companies: demanding higher transaction processing; implementing server and storage virtualization; and consolidating systems onto higher compute platforms, such as blade servers.
Emulex 8Gb/s products are an ideal fit for data center environments that utilize virtualized servers and take advantage of server consolidation. Virtualized servers running multiple applications require greater protection against data loss and security breaches. Emulex's 8Gb/s products incorporate enhanced security, data protection and virtualization features, which are critical for use in virtualized data center environments.
For example, Emulex's 8Gb/s family of products offers support for the industry standard Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP), which is designed to enable server to storage authentication across the SAN. Additionally, customers may leverage Emulex BlockGuard(tm) technology to provide enhanced end-to-end data integrity protection, which was demonstrated last quarter as part of the Data Integrity Initiative with LSI, Oracle and Seagate (http://www.emulex.com/press/2007/0418-01.jsp).
In addition to providing new security and data integrity features, Emulex remains committed to driving enhanced virtualization capabilities into its 8Gb/s family of products in the form of hardware acceleration for virtual fabric environments, designed to more efficiently segment and manage SANs. These enhancements expand upon Emulex's existing support for industry standard NPIV, which enables end users to maintain SAN best practices within virtualized server environments.
For more information on Emulex LightPulse(r) Fibre Channel HBAs, please visit http://www.emulex.com/products/hba/index.jsp or, to learn more about the company's Embedded IOC products, go to http://www.emulex.com/products/embeddedioc-iop/index.jsp.
About Emulex
Emulex Corporation creates enterprise-class products that intelligently connect storage, servers and networks. The world's leading server and storage providers rely on Emulex award-winning HBAs, intelligent storage platforms and embedded storage products, including switches, bridges, routers and I/O controllers, to build reliable, scalable and high performance storage and server solutions. Emulex is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE:ELX) and corporate headquarters are located in Costa Mesa, California. News releases and other information about Emulex Corporation are available at http://www.emulex.com.
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Emulex Safe Harbor Statement
"Safe Harbor" Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: With the exception of historical information, the statements set forth above include forward-looking statements that involve risk and uncertainties. The company wishes to caution readers that a number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Those factors include the rapidly changing nature of technology, evolving industry standards and frequent introductions of new products and enhancements by competitors; fluctuation in the growth of Fibre Channel and IP markets; changes in economic conditions or changes in end-user demand for technology solutions; fluctuations or delays in customer orders; the highly competitive nature of the markets for Emulex's products; Emulex's ability to gain market acceptance for its products; the company's ability to attract and retain skilled personnel; the company's reliance on third-party suppliers. These and other factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements are also discussed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its recent filings on Forms 8-K, 10-K and 10-Q. All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.