Emulex Introduces VFA5 Technology for New Lenovo Servers 

Emulex Corporation today announced new Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter 5 (VFA5) technology for the new Lenovo servers, based on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600/1600 v3 product families. The new Flex System CN4058S 8-port 10Gb VFA and CN4052 2-port 10Gb VFA are designed to reduce cost and complexity, increase performance, accelerate data, and support enterprise workloads such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), big data analytics, database management and emerging compute architectures.

“We are in the midst of an evolution across the server, networking and storage industries as virtualization, software-defined networking, big data analytics, and the move to public, private and hybrid cloud environments continues to put pressure on networks to be faster and more agile, requiring workload optimized I/O to become of paramount importance,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing, Emulex. “New Emulex VFA5 technology for the Flex System server family addresses these workload requirements with improved server utilization, increased small packet performance and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) support, delivering application and storage acceleration for next generation data center infrastructures.”

“The new Flex System family provides the security, efficiency and reliability required for next generation enterprise data centers,” said Jeff Howard, vice president, Flex System and BladeCenter, Lenovo. “Emulex VFA5 technology combined with the new Flex System accelerates IT workloads and increases data center efficiency across a wide range of I/O intensive enterprise, cloud and telco workloads.”

Emulex VFA5 technology provides the following key benefits for next generation Flex System server customers:

• Reducing Cost and Complexity: The Flex System CN4058S 8-port and CN4052 2-port VFA5 adapters are cost- and performance-optimized for integrated and converged infrastructures by offering a “triple play” of converged data, storage, and low latency RDMA networking on a common Ethernet fabric. This gives a flexible storage protocol option for running heterogeneous workloads on their increasingly converged infrastructures. The Flex System CN4058S and CN4052 VFA5 adapters deliver server power savings due to lower CPU usage, ranging from 50 watts to almost 100 watts per server vs. competing adapters. These adapters also support Virtual Fabric Mode (vNIC1) and Switch Independent Mode (vNIC2), and now Unified Fabric Port (UFP).
• Accelerating Data and Improving Performance: Flex System CN45058S and CN4052 VFA5 adapters support RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), which accelerates applications such as Microsoft SQL Server when using Windows Server SMB Direct, delivering application and storage acceleration through faster I/O operations. Flex System VFA5 adapters include Emulex Virtual Network Exceleration (VNeX) technology which offloads the header encapsulation process of next generation overlay network protocols, simplifying virtual machine (VM) mobility and network scalability, while optimizing server performance when compared to adapters without offload capabilities. Emulex VNeX technology allows customers to maintain CPU utilization thresholds and reduce CPU usage fluctuations, while adding more workloads to each server in virtual networking environments.
• Creating Workload and Storage Connectivity Flexibility: Lenovo VFA5 adapters deliver up to a 4x boost in small packet network performance, vs. previous generation adapters, which is critical to scale transaction-heavy and clustered applications and workloads such as telco, Web-scale and messaging environments. The Lenovo VFA5 adapters support FCoE offload, which accelerates storage protocol processing, and deliver up to 1.5 million I/O operations per second (IOPS), which is 2x better than previous generation adapters, enabling the server’s processing resources to focus on applications and improve the server’s performance. The Lenovo VFA5 adapters also support iSCSI offload, providing performance that is superior to iSCSI solutions based on software initiators and standard NICs, and support TCIP/IP and iSCSI or FCoE offloads on the same port (i.e. concurrent storage). FoCE and iSCSI offloads are available through Feature on Demand (FoD), which allows customers to lower their costs by allowing them to initially purchase a NIC and upgrade as their needs grow.