Emulex announced that EMC has qualified the Emulex LightPulse LPe12000 family of 8Gb/s Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) for the EMC CLARiiON, EMC Celerra and EMC Symmetrix networked storage system families. Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs, which are available from EMC through EMC Select, provide customers with new performance, advanced virtualization and security features, while maintaining backward compatibility with existing 4Gb/s and 2Gb/s Fibre Channel products.

"Once again, Emulex is teaming with EMC to deliver technology advances into the storage industry. The availability of next generation connectivity solutions validates our commitment to driving the transition to 8Gb/s Fibre Channel," said Mike Smith, executive vice president, Emulex Corporation. "Further, EMC's rigorous E-Lab testing and qualification process reinforces our best-in-class technology."

Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs are fully EMC E-Lab Tested for deployment in SAN environments with CLARiiON, Celerra and Symmetrix networked storage systems. The complete Emulex LPe12000 family of 8Gb/s HBAs are now available through the EMC Select program.

"With today's announcement, our customers can now take advantage of the new features that Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs offer. Leveraging Emulex for SAN connectivity will help ensure a seamless transition experience as IT managers upgrade from 2Gb/s or 4Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs in their EMC environments," said Justin Bartinoski, manager of the EMC Select Program, EMC. "Through EMC Select, we offer customers a wide-range of Emulex SAN connectivity solutions for our market leading networked storage systems."

The Emulex LPe12000 family of 8Gb/s HBAs, supported by EMC includes the dual channel LPe12002, single channel LPe12000 and midrange LPe1250. These new HBAs provide the I/O scalability necessary to support an increase in the number of applications running on a virtualized server. Additionally, Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs provide the increased I/O processing speed and throughput needed by large business-critical databases and transaction processing applications to scale to support additional users and larger database files.

Emulex is a longstanding participant in the EMC Select program, which provides customers with a convenient, single source for their total storage needs, and Emulex 2Gb/s and 4Gb/s HBAs are also qualified for use across the CLARiiON, Celerra and Symmetrix networked storage systems.