Features - Storage Innovations:

EMULEX MultiPulse AVAILABLE FOR IBM eServer pSeries SERVERS

Emulex Corp, a leader in Fibre Channel host bus adapters and provider of intelligent building blocks for the storage networking industry, announced availability of the Emulex MultiPulse HBA load-balancing and failover technology in conjunction with its centralized management framework, HBAnyware, for use with IBM eServer pSeries systems running Linux. MultiPulse enables pSeries solutions to offer robust, end-to-end failover when connected to Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs).

MultiPulse is a unique driver-based technology that leverages the HBA's full visibility of the SAN to enhance IBM systems' ability to deliver superior reliability, performance and HBA resource utilization. MultiPulse leverages the HBA drivers' access to critical information residing in the driver layer, to provide failover and load-balancing capabilities when used with Emulex Fibre Channel HBAs.

"IBM eServer pSeries systems continue to provide customers with industryleading reliability, scalability and availability features to meet the growing demands of mission critical enterprise computing environments," said Brian Connors, vice president of Linux on POWER at IBM. "Emulex's MultiPulse and HBAnyware technologies on IBM eServer pSeries servers running Linux will help entry-level, mid-range and high-end customers to save additional technology costs and improve performance. Emulex's support of our Linux on Power offerings reinforces the importance and commitment of the market to Linux and Linux on Power."

"Use of MultiPulse technology with IBM eServer pSeries systems validates its capabilities to provide additional SAN reliability and performance," said Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Emulex. "These Emulex technologies will provide more robust, intelligent options to increase performance and HBA resource utilization across heterogeneous enterprise-level storage networks."

MultiPulse utilizes critical information residing in the driver layer, such as detailed link status and configuration information, to intelligently reroute network traffic around a failed element in as little as two seconds, ensuring the continued operation of critical data center activity. Emulex's MultiPulse technology also aggregates the bandwidth and availability of HBAs, switch ports, array controllers and multi-port JBODs, and intelligently manages multiple I/O streams, directing each request to the least utilized path. This functionality is designed to maximize the efficiency and utilization of HBA resources, and provide improved performance. Leveraging the HBAnyware framework enables users to take advantage of a centralized HBA management suite for configuration and management of all the Emulex host bus adapters in a SAN.