I perceive the following press release to be VERY good news for ANCR. The adapter had been the bottleneck preventing the switches to fully utilize it's low latency and full capacity...
Emulex Announces High Performance Full Duplex Fibre Channel PCI Host Bus Adapter
BusinessWire, Friday, January 08, 1999 at 09:17
COSTA MESA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 8, 1999--
Software Compatibility With Existing Products Provides Seamless
Upgrade, Preserving Customer Investments
Emulex Corp. (NASDAQ:EMLX), a leader in fibre channel
technology and products, Friday announced the availability of the
industry's highest performance fibre channel host adapter, the
LightPulse(TM) LP8000.
Running full duplex, the LP8000 has been measured at 150MB/s,
and is capable of sustaining throughput of 200MB/s with a single fibre
channel connection. The LP8000, the latest in a family of software
compatible high-performance host adapters, delivers more than 30,000
I/Os per second from a single adapter in the latest Xeon-based server
running Windows NT. The LP8000 also features sophisticated hardware
that provides superior performance in Storage Area Networks (SANs),
delivering low latency and high throughput in switched, loop and
clustered environments.
"The LP8000 sets new benchmarks for performance and features,"
stated Mike Smith, senior director of fibre channel marketing for
Emulex. "With this announcement, Emulex is positioned to extend its
leadership position in fibre channel, and positions us for growth in
the NT and UNIX enterprise computing environments," he added.
"The Fibre Channel Market showed strong growth in the fourth
quarter of 1998," said Ed Frymoyer, president of emf associates.
"Emulex has been instrumental in the development and deployment of
Fibre Channel products for the market. They are considered a market
leader in high performance PCI host bus adapters and the introduction
of the LP8000 continues this legacy," he added.
The LP8000 achieves its performance through the use of its ASIC
technology and firmware, a 233 MIPS on-board processor, and the use of
advanced features such as 64-bit PCI and full-duplex fibre channel
transfers. This technology enables the LP8000 to deliver leading
performance with minimal host CPU utilization.
Designed to support mission critical enterprise applications, the
LP8000 provides a unique combination of features, including full
fabric support using F_Port and FL_Port connections, high data
integrity, up to 100km cabling and support for all fibre channel
topologies and classes 2 and 3. The LP8000 features a GBIC physical
interface, providing customers with flexibility to support a full
range of cabling options, including copper, multi-mode fiber or
single-mode fiber. The LP8000 is also available with embedded copper
and embedded optical physical interface options.
Emulex provides the richest fibre channel software support
available in the industry. The LP8000 maintains compatibility with
customer-specific drivers written to Emulex's "Service Level
Interface" (SLI) API specification, and is supported by drivers for a
wide range of operating systems, including Windows NT, Solaris, AIX,
UnixWare, and NetWare. The LP8000 provides support for storage
protocol (SCSI), network protocol (IP), as well as multi-protocol
(SCSI & IP) operation, enabling advanced storage area network (SAN),
clustering and network applications.
"High performance enterprise Fibre Channel applications demand 64
bit PCI bus support and must anticipate full-duplex data traffic. The
SAN, clustering and network environments also need comprehensive OS,
Fibre Channel port and top level protocol support," said Robert Gray,
research manager, International Data Corp. "Emulex is a Fibre
Channel adapter market leader with an impressive list of OEM
customers. The LP8000 clearly strengthens the company's position," he
added.
The LP8000, available now, joins Emulex's broad family of fibre
channel product offerings addressing the needs of both mission
critical enterprise applications and direct connect storage links.
Emulex is the leading supplier of full duplex PCI gigabit fibre
channel adapters with a large installed base of LP7000/E and LP6000/E
customers, the predecessors to the new LP8000 family. Two additional
offerings include the LP3000 which is the industry's leading price
performance fibre channel adapter for direct attach storage
applications and the innovative LH5000 digital re-timing hub which
include a full suite of Web and SNMP management capabilities.
Steve |
