Emulex Announces Family of ExpressConfig Offerings to Optimize Cloud, Hyperscale, and Enterprise Environments 

Emulex Corporation today announced a family of Emulex ExpressConfig Solutions designed to help IT professionals optimize I/O connectivity for cloud, hyperscale and enterprise environments. By providing the necessary architecture, components, features, analysis, configuration settings and software drivers, Emulex ExpresConfig Solutions will help customers get the most value out of the pre-designed integrated system. The first solution in the series, ExpressConfig for OpenStack core networks, provides an easy-to-follow blueprint leveraging unique Emulex I/O connectivity capabilities for allocating bandwidth, converging multiple protocols, safely isolating OpenStack core networks or applications, and efficiently managing the multiple networks typically associated with large-scale data centers.

“Emulex sees OpenStack as an I/O development platform that allows us to provide workload optimization services, orchestration management tools and engineered solutions that are ready to deploy for new hyperscale data centers and public or private cloud environments,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing, Emulex. “The Emulex ExpressConfig Solutions leverage industry-leading Emulex Universal Multi-Channel (UMC) Network Interface Card (NIC) partitioning with the open ecosystem of tools available in the OpenStack community to deliver on the growing demands for flexibility, scalability and lower operating costs.”

Today, OpenStack users can benefit from Emulex UMC NIC partitioning to optimize bandwidth allocation between the necessary public, private, storage and management networks. The Emulex UMC enables administrators to increase I/O performance and resource utilization, while reducing cost and power consumption by consolidating cables and network ports. In addition, Emulex UMC can ensure minimum bandwidth allocations are maintained, eliminating the potential for tunnel networks to be inadvertently starved by external traffic. For smaller configurations, those safeguards also prevent performance imbalances, enabling the shared use of hardware so the compute and storage nodes can reside on the same server. Where high availability is important, Emulex UMC also provides better resiliency by improving network isolation against failures or security threats. Emulex products provide a more effective way to allocate bandwidth, consolidate traffic types, improve resource utilization and provide greater flexibility for provisioning applications in large scale data centers.

Working with its partners such as Canonical, HP, Mirantis, Red Hat and Quanta, Emulex is creating ExpressConfig Solutions for advanced storage, networking, and big data applications that will be included with upcoming OpenStack releases. These solution blueprints build upon current capabilities to increase tenant density and resource utilization while improving performance, end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) policy enforcement and overall power consumption. Solution focus areas will address key pain points like storage performance and scalability, virtualization and CPU overhead, tenant vulnerability to “noisy neighbor” effects that misallocate bandwidth, and data protection and accessibility for database applications.

The upcoming ExpressConfig Solutions will include:

• Integrated software drivers for Neutron, Cinder and Horizon modules
• Multi-function feature validation confirming key features work as expected in combination with other components
• Performance characterization for important I/O metrics
• Solution design guides with configuration techniques and best practices
• Solution specific technical services and support
• Certification and commercial support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform

The new Emulex ExpressConfig Solutions are designed for use with Emulex OneConnect OCe14000 family of 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet (10GbE and 40GbE) Network Adapters and Converged Network Adapters (CNAs), and provide powerful tools, information and features that enable enterprises to save time, lower costs and increase confidence as they scale their cloud and hyperscale environments.