Emulex 10GbE NICs Enhance HP ProLiant Gen9 Platforms 

Emulex Corporation today announced that its 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) technology is being used in the HP Ethernet 10Gb 2-port 557SFP+ Adapter PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 Network Interface Card (NIC) for the HP ProLiant Gen9 rack and tower servers. Utilizing Emulex's newest 10GbE technology in the latest generation PCI 3.0 format helps HP deliver leading-edge performance, value and simplicity with advanced features and functionality for enterprise virtualization and hybrid cloud deployments.

"Emulex offers a broad portfolio of I/O connectivity solutions for HP ProLiant Gen9 servers, delivering comprehensive coverage across form factors as well as networking and storage protocols," said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing, Emulex. "The HP 557SFP+ NIC delivers exclusive Emulex advanced features such as RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and tunnel offloading, giving customers the functionality they need as they leverage next generation technologies in their data centers, such as network functions virtualization (NFV), hybrid cloud overlay networks and RoCE."

The HP 557SFP+ NIC, based on Emulex OneConnect Ethernet Network Adapter technology, delivers the following key benefits for HP ProLiant Gen9 environments:

• Increased Networking Performance: The HP 557SFP+ NIC enables up to four times better small packet processing performance than the previous generation adapter.  Improvements in small packet processing performance are important for accelerating Voice over IP (VoIP), mobile messaging, gaming, and select NFV applications.
• Superior Server CPU Effectiveness with Tunnel Offloads: The HP 557SFP+ NIC includes the industry's only hardware offload support for Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) running on VMware and Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE) tunnels, designed to simplify virtual machine (VM) mobility and network scalability while optimizing server performance when compared to adapters that lack offload capability.
• More I/O Per Unit of Server CPU: For hybrid cloud overlay networks, the HP 557SFP+ NIC provides increased throughput by up to 143 percent and increased CPU effectiveness by up to 46 percent vs. adapters without overlay networking offload, further optimizing server performance.
• Accelerated Network Attached File Storage (NAS) I/O: Accelerated file storage I/O enhances Microsoft applications with exclusive, high performance SMB Direct with RoCE networking hardware offload support. RoCE reduces I/O response time and server CPU consumption for NAS infrastructures by bypassing software, thereby reducing CPU utilization for fast data transfer.

"In today's cloud and mobile-first world, customers face challenges with increasingly complex network traffic patterns, increases in small packets, need to improve responsiveness, and doing more with less," said McLeod Glass, vice president, ProLiant Rack and Tower Product Management, HP. "The new HP 557SFP+ NIC, based on Emulex OneConnect technology, adds to the extensive Emulex I/O adapter portfolio we offer our HP ProLiant customers, giving them the flexibility, protocol choice and performance they need, while reducing total cost of ownership. The advanced 10GbE capabilities in the HP 557SFP+ NIC, including tunnel offload support, boosts HP ProLiant server performance and increases overall server efficiency, which is key to maximizing host VM density, accelerating performance, and increasing the efficiency of applications such as Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration, SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint with SMB Direct."