Emulex Announces Availability of Intel Itanium 2 Processor-Ready Fibre Channel HBAs

Business Wire, July 8, 2002

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

LightPulse(R) Family of Host Bus Adapters Provides Unique Driver

Compatibility Model to Enable Seamless Migration to Itanium 2-Based

Platforms

Emulex Corp. (NYSE:ELX), the world's largest supplier of storage networking host bus adapters (HBAs), today announced that its LightPulse family of Fibre Channel HBAs fully support Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processor-based platforms.

The Emulex family of HBAs enables seamless migration to the emerging Itanium 2-based platforms via its firmware upgradeability and driver compatibility across all HBA generations. Emulex's unique architecture allows customers to leverage existing SAN infrastructure investments, while migrating to newer server platforms. As a result, the entire family of Emulex HBAs, including the recently announced PCI-X LP9802 and LP9402DC HBAs, are Itanium 2 processor-ready.

"We have worked closely with Emulex to ensure that its connectivity solutions are fully compatible for use with the new Itanium 2 processor," said Mike Graf, product line manager for Intel's Itanium processor family. "The Itanium 2 processor will bring superior performance to the most demanding enterprise and technical computing applications."

The Itanium 2 processor is the second in the Itanium processor family, a line of high-end processors from Intel that brings the performance and volume economics of Intel Architecture to the most data-intensive business-critical and technical computing applications. Itanium 2-based servers and workstations are expected to deliver up to twice the performance of Itanium-based systems.

"Emulex is pleased with the performance results of Intel's new Itanium 2 processor, and in anticipation of the introduction, the two companies have worked closely to ensure the entire family of Emulex HBAs is fully compatible upon release of this new processor," said Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing at Emulex.

"As performance and bandwidth continue to play a key role in systems deployment, Emulex will work closely with industry leaders such as Intel to provide customers with best-in-class storage networking connectivity solutions."

The Emulex LightPulse LP9802, which is Itanium 2 processor-ready, offers a highly integrated, full-duplex 2Gb/s Fibre Channel PCI-X HBA for use in servers based on either PCI or PCI-X expansion busses providing superior performance.

Based on Emulex's latest-generation Pegasus ASIC, the LP9802 delivers 30 percent greater I/O processing performance than its predecessor. The Emulex LP9402DC offers two independent 2Gb/s Fibre Channel HBA interfaces in a single PCI-X slot, which also delivers exceptional performance.

The Emulex Family of Host Bus Adapters

The Emulex family of HBAs offers high performance, standards-based connectivity solutions for both Fibre Channel and Internet protocol (IP) storage networking environments. Emulex host bus adapters provide a unique combination of features required for mission-critical enterprise environments that deliver reliability, high bandwidth, server CPU offload, low latency and scalable connectivity.

Emulex HBAs also offer a unique driver architecture that enables compatibility of a single operating system driver across Emulex's entire product line and a firmware-based architecture. These features help to lower the customer's total cost of ownership and reduce management complexity, while enabling a seamless migration path to next-generation technologies.

For information about how Emulex HBAs increase SAN productivity and efficiency, visit the Emulex Web site and download the IDC whitepaper titled, "Measuring the HBA's Role in SAN Management."

The Emulex LightPulse family of Fibre Channel HBAs offers full fabric support, high data integrity, full-duplex operation, data buffering for up to 100km of cabling and support for all Fibre Channel topologies. The Emulex LightPulse family of Fibre Channel products includes the 2Gb/s LP9802 and LP982 PCI-X HBAs, the LP9002L and LP952L PCI HBAs, the LP9002C CompactPCI HBA, the LP9002S SBus-based HBA and the market-leading LP8000.

The Emulex family of IP-based storage networking host bus adapters includes the GN9000/SI iSCSI host bus adapter and the GN9000/VI VI/IP host bus adapter. The Emulex GN9000/SI is designed to provide the high performance iSCSI connectivity over gigabit Ethernet for PCI-based systems.

The Emulex GN9000/VI VI/IP HBA enables network attached storage (NAS) appliances and hosts to exchange file system data over IP networks, while gaining the high throughput, low latency and reduced CPU overhead benefits of the virtual interface (VI) architecture. For more information on the Emulex product families, visit www.emulex.com.

About Emulex

Emulex is a leading supplier and developer of storage networking host bus adapters based on both Fibre Channel and IP networking technologies. The Emulex product families are based on internally developed ASIC, firmware and software technologies, and offer customers high performance, scalability, flexibility and reduced total cost of ownership.