Emulex, Cisco and VMware designed and launched new storage networking solution

Jan 30 — Announced at this week’s Cisco Networkers in Barcelona, Spain, Emulex Corporation, partnering with Cisco and VMWare, launched a joint storage networking solution. The new solution runs on VMware virtualization infrastructure and incorporates Emulex’s LightPulse 4Gb/s host bus adapters (HBAs), Cisco’s MDS Fibre Channel switches and VMware’s ESX Server 3.5.
The new solution offers industry-standard NPIV to provide customers with the functionality to maintain storage area network (SAN) best practices, while delivering improved Quality of Service (QoS) and data protection capabilities. Additionally, Emulex has teamed with Cisco and VMware to integrate NPIV functionality into VMware VMotion technology, which enhances storage access by maintaining the same Virtual Port ID while migrating live virtual machines from one physical host to another.
“This solution brings together the best in virtualized server and storage technologies, innovation and expertise by combining the unique features associated with NPIV and VMware VMotion. VMware VMotion helps eliminate downtime and works with NPIV to ensure a continuous SAN connection during the virtual machine migration process, and enables leverage of critical features and functionality, such as zoning,” said Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing, Emulex Corporation. “By working with Cisco and VMware, we can provide our joint customers with a complete set of tools to enable infrastructure-wide virtualization and its full benefits including business continuity, disaster recovery and simplified IT management.”
Home Interiors & Gifts, Inc., a direct seller of home accessories in North America, is currently migrating more than 100 Windows server hosts to a VMware virtualized environment and is in the process of converting all of its SAN connectivity to Emulex LightPulse HBAs.
“We are impressed with the capabilities of Emulex HBAs and the relationship between Emulex, Cisco and VMware. Implementing Emulex’s LightPulse Virtual HBA technology with industry-standard NPIV support is a necessary step in our ongoing transition to a virtualized data center environment,” said Levi Spears, SAN and Windows system administrator, Home Interiors & Gifts, Inc. “With the full integration of Emulex Virtual HBA technology within VMware ESX Server, we now have an easy route to implement SAN management best practices with capabilities such as zoning, array LUN masking and mapping across all of our virtual machines.”
Another key capability of using the Emulex, Cisco and VMware solution includes the ability to create a unique identity for each virtual machine that can be tracked throughout the SAN. With this virtual machine identity, the data center manager can track statistics such as I/O throughput and error rates to better manage storage traffic and detect errors at the virtual machine level.
“Networked storage is fundamental to a virtualized architecture,” said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. “This solution provides new options for implementing SAN best practices within a virtualized environment.”
Emulex and Cisco have created a Solution Guide that provides data center users with practical use cases and deployment scenarios for maximizing and understanding the benefits of NPIV technology within a VMware environment.