INTERCONNECTS

Emulex Corporation today announced that it has signed a multi-year, cross licensing patent agreement with IBM, enabling Emulex to accelerate the integration of their OneConnect Universal Converged Network Adapter (UCNA) architecture within IBM platforms. These UCNAs will be available for integration into virtualized, high performance servers such as IBM’s System p, System x and BladeCenter product offerings.

Emulex currently delivers its LightPulse 4Gb/s and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel adapters for IBM servers used for virtualization, database serving, data center storage networking, and cloud computing environments. Licensing IBM patents will accelerate the integration of Emulex’s connectivity products into IBM virtualized, high performance data center solutions, supporting unified network connectivity for 10Gb/s Ethernet, 16Gb/s Fibre Channel, 10Gb/s iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) solutions.

“This licensing agreement enables an expanded Emulex networking portfolio for our clients looking to virtualize their data center environment with IBM high performance servers,” said Doug Balog, vice president of modular development, IBM Systems and Technology Group. “The agreement underscores IBM’s commitment to innovation with ecosystem partners and is consistent with our drive towards industry interoperability to provide clients the ultimate choice.”

The Emulex OneConnect UCNA platform is the only CNA solution that supports hardware offload and acceleration for TCP/IP, iSCSI, and FCoE protocols on a single-chip that is optimized to support both IP and storage networking demands, enabling data center managers to meet the performance and architecture requirements of networking, storage and clustering applications with one single integrated adapter solution.

“Today’s announcement builds on Emulex and IBM’s history of close collaboration and joint development of emerging converged networking solutions,” said Jim McCluney, president and chief executive officer, Emulex. “IBM is leading the way in developing and supporting the standardization of Ethernet enhancements that will support the converged networking infrastructure of next-generation data centers. With our cross-license patent agreement and joint collaboration efforts we can further integrate our joint development efforts and deliver solutions to our end customers that support their efforts to improve data center consolidation, efficiency, flexibility and scalability.”

To learn more about Emulex OneConnect UCNAs, please visit: http://www.emulex.com/products/strategic-direction/oneconnect-universal-cna.html

For more information on Emulex connectivity solutions for IBM, visit: http://www.emulex-ibm.com/

To learn more about Emulex, please visit: http://www.emulex.com