Today Broadcom announced the industry’s first family of Gen 7 Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) designed for accelerating today’s mission-critical enterprise workloads and emerging mission-critical applications including artificial intelligence-based business analytics. The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) only announced the specifications for 7th generation fibre last month so this is quick work.
Today Broadcom announced the industry’s first family of Gen 7 Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) designed for accelerating today’s mission-critical enterprise workloads and emerging mission-critical applications including artificial intelligence-based business analytics. The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) only announced the specifications for 7th generation fibre last month so this is quick work.
Broadcom’s Emulex LPe35000-series HBAs are the first products released that comply with the FC-PI-7 standard. The LPe35000 delivers sub 10us roundtrip latency, 2x the bandwidth of Gen 6. IOPS clock in at over 5 million IOPS. Broadcom’s Oracle Database testing of their new cables shows up to 55% better performance than competitor’s. It is important to remember that speed gains, especially speed gains this high, don’t just mean faster delivery. They’re also efficiency gains since systems using the new cables will spend less time waiting and be able to enter low power mode faster. Additionally, higher throughputs mean fewer servers can handle the same load creating a multiplicity of options to reduce costs or expand.
In addition to the apparent advantages of 7thgeneration fibre, Broadcom’s new Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) have also been improved. Broadcom is claiming that the Emulex LPe35000-series HBAs, working in concert with Broadcom’s Brocade directors and switches, eliminate the need to reboot servers for firmware updates. Broadcom is also claiming their HBAs can aggregate several physical ports to form a single, logical, extremely high-bandwidth 128GFC port. Additionally, the new software should be able to perform full error diagnosis and resolution without impacting traffic on any other port on the HBA.
Dell EMC will be offering Gen 7 FC connectivity via select Dell EMC PowerEdge servers.
Availability
Emulex LPe35000-series HBAs are available in single-port, dual-port, and quad-port models.
Emulex XE601 Gen 7 Fibre Channel controller is available in 64GFC and 32GFC configurations.
Broadcom’s Emulex LPe35000-series
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