The Benefits of Emulex 16 Gb (Gen 6) FC HBAs in Lenovo Solutions

Ensuring that business-critical data is available when needed is an ever-growing need in IT. Your systems must store massive amounts of data quickly and retrieve it efficiently. Simultaneously, you must use new technologies that can improve efficiency and take advantage of these technologies within limited budgets. One measure of growing efficiency in recent years is CPU processing power, which far exceeds growth in disk input/output (I/O). For this reason, disk I/O is often the reason for bottlenecks in high-performance applications.

Emulex 16 Gb (Gen 6) Fibre Channel HBA connectivity that is combined with other storage technologies, such as Lenovo 16 Gb (Gen 5) FC SAN switches, hybrid storage with solid-state drives and storage tiering, and all-flash storage arrays, can help to balance the performance of storage subsystem with the server processing capabilities.

This Lenovo Press publication describes server performance imbalance that can be found in typical application environments and how to address this issue with the 16 Gb (Gen 6) Fibre Channel host connectivity to provide required levels of performance and availability for the storage-intensive applications.

This paper is intended for IT professionals who want to learn more about the Emulex 16 Gb (Gen 6) FC HBAs for Lenovo System x servers and the benefits that they provide to the customers in storage connectivity solutions.

Executive summary
Storage requirements
Storage performance
Fibre Channel SANs versus converged networks
Benefits of 16 Gb Fibre Channel SANs
Emulex 16 Gb Gen6 FC HBAs for Lenovo System x servers
Deployment scenarios of 16 Gb (Gen 6) FC host connectivity
Conclusion

Changes in the November 10 update:

• Grammar and style corrections

Related product families

Product families related to this document are the following:

• Host Bus Adapters