At Storage Networking World last week, a number of vendors, including Emulex and CommVault, introduced products ranging from IP storage-area networks to new implementations of the Fibre Channel over Ethernet specification.

Here are highlights of the announcements from Emulex and CommVault:

Emulex introduced the LightPulse LP21000 family of converged network adapters, which combine storage, Ethernet and interprocess communication traffic into a single adapters, which can be made fault-tolerant by pairing it with another LP21000.

By deploying the LightPulse LP21000, customers can reduce the number of cables they use by as much as 3 to 1, and also their energy consumption. By letting one converged network adapter take on the roles of separate Fibre Channel, Ethernet and InfiniBand adapters, customers can also receive the impact on the host server.

CommVault announced that its Simpana software data protection suite now supports Windows Server 2008, bringing extra data protection to customers of that ilk. In addition, CommVault announced that it will support the new Microsoft Hypervisor, virtualization capabilities built into Windows Server 2008.

The new capabilities CommVault has added to Simpana include advanced e-discovery/legal hold capabilities; enhanced remote office data protection with disk-based backup and archive; broadened storage resource management; as well as support for Microsoft applications.

Advanced e-discovery/legal hold capabilities let the customer display search result views that provide working collections of search hits, which they can then annotate and organize.

Enhanced remote office data protection lets users combine replication with CommVault Continuous Data Replicator with bandwidth efficiencies and disk savings.

CommVault now also provides broadened storage-resource management support for Linux and Microsoft 64-bit environments

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.