BLADE Network Technologies, Emulex Fuel Adoption of Converged Networking Data Centers

BLADE Network Technologies Inc. and Emulex Corporation are reportedly planning to launch a global co-marketing campaign to accelerate the adoption of converged networking in the data center. BLADE Network Technologies (BLADE) provides Gigabit and 10G Ethernet cloud-ready networking solutions for dynamic, enterprise data centers throughout.

 

BLADE and Emulex (News - Alert) will develop solution marketing initiatives and conduct joint business development activities to showcase the advantages of BLADE and Emulex solutions for converged networks that utilize next-generation data center technologies. The campaign will be launched at conference next week. The two companies will launch their co-marketing campaign in Europe at another conference in Germany.

 

According to Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of business development at Emulex, both companies are working together to bring the shared vision of converged networking for the data center to customers and channel partners. Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapters for IBM (News - Alert) BladeCenter based on Emulex’ OneConnect  Universal Converged Network Adapter architecture works with BLADE's convergence-ready switches to provide an ideal solution for IBM BladeCenter customers looking at lowering capital expenditures, maximizing blade consolidation and deploying highly virtualized environments.

 

The combination of Emulex's Virtual Fabric Adapter CFFh and BLADE's convergence-ready BNT 10-port 10G Ethernet Switch Module for IBM BladeCenter HS22 blade servers provides an end-to-end converged networking solution in highly virtualized blade server environments using VMware. This IBM BladeCenter Virtual Fabric gives uers the flexibility of 100Mb-to-10Gb Ethernet connectivity, virtual port switching and converged networking with iSCSI or FCoE. The solution enables network policies to move along with Virtual Machines to maintain application performance, availability and security by using BLADE's SmartConnect with VMready software on BLADE switches in virtualized data centers with a large number of virtual ports.

 

The Emulex-BLADE offering provides a virtual fabric for IBM BladeCenter that can be configured with two to eight virtual NICs from a physical adapter. Each vNIC and blade switch can be configured for any bandwidth between 100Mb and 10Gb in increments of 100Mb. Users can enhance the Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter functionality with license upgrades to next-generation Fiber Channel over Ethernet or hardware iSCSI, and upgrade BLADE 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches that support iSCSI to FCoE. This lets a common I/O infrastructure to support diverse application requirements within the data center.

 

Meanwhile, the Virtual Fabric solution for IBM BladeCenter lets customers significantly reduce the number of adapters, switches and cabling by offering up to eight virtual adapters with the flexibility to work at any bandwidth from 100Mb to 10Gb.

 

According to Tim Shaughnessy, vice president of Marketing, BLADE Network Technologies, the company is pleased to collaborate with Emulex to demonstrate the IBM BladeCenter Virtual Fabric in promoting how this advanced solution delivers flexible 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and converged networking using iSCSI or FCoE along with its VMready to assist workloads that span a large number of virtual switch ports.