Sun ships Emulex HBAs with new Sun Fire servers

Emulex and Sun last week partnered to have Emulex host bus adapters installed in Sun’s newest UltraSparc T1-base Sun Fire server, the T2000, which was recently announced.

The Sun Fire T2000 provides high-performance with minimal power requirements and is based Sun’s new multicore, multithreaded UltraSparc T1 processor.

Using the 4Gbps Emulex host bus adapters, the Sun Fire server can attach to a Fibre Channel storage-area network (SAN). The PCI-Express-based adapters work with the Solaris operating system environment to give users maximum throughput. It is backward compatible with 1Gbps and 2Gbps Fibre Channel networks and Emulex claims the adapters are 33% faster than adapters from competitors such as Qlogic.

The LPe11000 host bus adapters will be branded the StorageTek SG-XOCUE1FC-EM4 and the StorageTek SG-XPCIE2FC-EM4. The first is a single channel adapter; the second is a dual-channel adapter. (When Sun acquired StorageTek in August, the company decided to adopt the StorageTek branding for its storage products.)

Emulex uses a technology called Universal Boot that allows the server to boot from the SAN.

The adapters are managed with Emulex’s driver-based technology HBAnyware, which enables the discovery and management of host bus adapters in the SAN. HBAnyware also supports remote firmware upgrades.

The adapters will also be supported on the Sun Fire Opteron-based servers and on Windows and Linux based servers. They are expected to be available this month starting at prices that are competitive with 2Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs.