Five Reasons to Conduct a Storage Assessment Today
In theory, Ethernet is supposed to be supplanting Fibre Channel, but as IT organizations start to build increasingly larger clouds, the I/O performance attributes of Fibre Channel continue to be too good to ignore.
At the VMworld 2013 conference today, Emulex unveiled its latest Fibre Channel offerings including a quad-port adapter that provides up to 2.4 million I/O operations per second (IOPs). The LPe 16004 Fibre Channel HBA and the LPe15004 low-profile Fibre Channel HB are part of the Emulex Gen 5 Fibre Channel product family.
Barbara Porter, senior product marketing manager for Emulex Fibre Channel products, says not only is increased physical and virtual server density requiring more IOPs to be delivered than ever, the rise of Flash storage systems is creating a hunger for IOPs with which existing adapters can’t keep pace.
In addition to the raw performance, Porter says that Emulex adapters now provide the best dollar per I/O ratio in the industry, which in the final analysis is the metric at which most storage products are judged.
Porter also notes that Emulex is already at work on a next-generation implementation of its Fibre Channel adapters that will be based on a forthcoming 32G Fibre Channel standard that should be ratified later this year.
IT organizations are probably going to have a mix of Fibre Channel and Ethernet storage systems for years to come, so while Fibre channel systems may be more difficult to manage, when it comes to raw IOPS, Fibre Channel still can’t be beat.
