Emulex Corporation announced its LightPulse Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter (HBA) family is supported and available for the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 environments.

Emulex HBAs feature LightPulse Virtual HBA technology, which extends the functionality of the Hyper-V virtualization feature in Windows Server 2008 by delivering greater storage security and enhanced management and migration of virtual machines. Emulex LightPulse Virtual HBA technology enables end users to 'virtualize' SAN connections so that each virtual machine has independent access to its own protected storage. Hyper-V helps users reduce costs, increase hardware utilization, optimize their infrastructure and improve server availability.

Another feature of Windows Server 2008 supported by Emulex is support for the Message-Signaled Interrupts (MSI) and MSI-X (MSI eXtended) standards. MSI and MSI-X are interrupt handling mechanisms, which enable improved application performance, reduced host CPU utilization and greater I/O scalability by allocating each HBA with its own set of interrupts. Internal benchmark testing has demonstrated a 30 percent increase in CPU efficiency in MSI supported systems configured with Emulex LightPulse HBAs. High transaction applications, such as Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, benefit from enhanced overall system performance by using Emulex HBAs.

Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel HBAs also support server-to-fabric authentication capabilities, which are designed to protect all the access points into the SAN. Emulex's implementation of authentication within the HBA is the first to comply with the Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP). Emulex HBAs are capable of protecting end users against worldwide port name spoofing, host masquerading and non-malicious outages caused by human error.

"Emulex is committed to collaborating with Microsoft to deliver state-of-the-art solutions for the enterprise-class data center," said Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing, Emulex Corp. "The integration of Emulex's LightPulse Virtual HBA technology, MSI and MSI-X support, and enhanced security provide our joint customers with greater storage security, increased virtual machine manageability, and increased efficiency."

"Today's IT customers are looking for increased dependability, scalability and security features," said Ward Ralston, group technical product manager for Windows Server Marketing at Microsoft Corp. "With Emulex built on Windows Server 2008, customers can achieve a highly reliable infrastructure for their business-critical applications."

Emulex is a member of the Microsoft Interop Vendor Alliance and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with HBAs that support Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows NT operating systems. Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel HBAs are also incorporated into Microsoft Technology Centers worldwide, where Microsoft customers can explore a wide variety of options for easily and reliably connecting servers to SANs. To learn more about Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel HBAs, visit http://www.emulex.com/products/hba/index.jsp.