Tuesday, July 19, 2011

At the heart of the ECA is the XE201, Emulex’s multi-fabric engine. It yields very high performance. While Emulex is not ready to post official numbers yet, they expect each XE201 to be able to deliver well above 1 million IOPS, which is critical considering the potential traffic each card may carry in the high port density, high availability configurations.

For example, if today you are mostly interested in upgrading your current FC infrastructure and don’t have time to experiment with a new protocol, you can start with a 2 X 8Gb FC card and then later, as the need demands, enable two 10GbE ports for use in FCoE or iSCSI environments. Or if 8Gb FC is solving your problem, you can enable the other two ports to also be 8Gb FC and have four ports of 8Gb FC at your disposal. Conversely if you have an Ethernet environment, you can start with two 10GbE ports and then add FC in the future or add two more ports of 10GbE in the future. For very high performance environments, the XE201 I/O Controller can be configured as either dual 16Gb FC or a single 40GbE as well.

Another important capability of the XE201 is its ability to provide dynamic workload balancing. The XE201 has eight processing cores to move traffic and coordinate all the diverse protocols and cloud scalability through the adapter. With its vScale™ and vEngine™ innovations, the processing power can be moved to each adapter port as needed, and to each of hundreds of virtual functions as needed. If the adapter detects a port that is building up I/O depth, then more processors are assigned to that port to help prevent a bottleneck.

The XE201 also has a virtual I/O vEngine which allows support for port virtualization capabilities as various hypervisor and operating systems begin to support them. This would allow the storage manager to create virtual ports with guaranteed bandwidth and assign those to hundreds of virtual machines. Port virtualization will also get the hypervisor/OS out of the port virtualization business and freeing them to support higher virtual machine densities.

Storage Swiss Take

Emulex has been making the right moves lately, first by defocusing a bit on FCoE and providing 10GbE connectivity only in their adapters, always with the potential to upgrade to FCoE and iSCSI offloads in the future. Now with the XE201 they are providing the ultimate in flexibility to allow the storage manager to solve today’s problems, while not pigeon-holing themselves into the wrong protocol or fabric in the future.

George Crump, Senior Analyst