Emulex Corporation has announced its new LightPulse 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), the ninth generation of Fibre Channel adapters, which deliver over one million I/O per second (IOPS) on a single port, enabling high-performance I/O for high density, business-critical cloud and virtualized data centers.

The new LPe16000 HBAs are based on the Emulex Engine XE201 I/O Controller (IOC), the industry's first and only quad-port converged fabric controller that supports 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE), 16GFC and up to 40GbE-based network convergence. The XE201 IOC offers vScale workload-based performance and scalability with an eight-core architecture that supports pooling of resources for dynamic allocation to multiple protocols. It also supports vPath virtual I/O support for emerging I/O virtualization standards that allow data to be forwarded between collocated virtual machines (VMs) while ensuring I/O traffic isolation, and GreenState power efficiency.

Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing, Emulex explains: "This adapter is about more than just another Fibre Channel speed bump, it is designed to support next-generation cloud and virtualization environments with our vScale programmable ASIC technology, VM scalability, enhanced quality of service, data integrity and performance management features." [www.emulex.com]