IBM to Use Emulex Storage Adapters with eServers
Declaring the move a sign of its commitment to high-performance server and storage solutions, IBM has signed an agreement with Emulex Corporation to use the Emulex LightPulse LP9002 host bus adapters with its eServer iSeries offerings.
By offering Emulex’s host bus adapters as part of its eServer line, IBM is trying to position its business server for small-to-mid sized businesses as a good all-in-one solution for storage needs. The effort to market eServer as a good storage device is logical as the servers have come to be known for their reliability and scalability.
Likewise, Hewlett-Packard Company has made similar moves on the storage space, recently announcing several new ultra-thin Netservers and disk and tape array storage appliances. For both IBM and HP, storage has become an attractive niche for server offerings because of the abundance of data enterprises and service providers are now collecting.
Emulex’s host bus adapters offer high performance, standards-based connectivity solutions for both Fibre Channel and Internet protocol storage networking environments. The Emulex 66MHz PCI LP9002, which is the model IBM will be using with its eServers, supports migration to the latest 2Gb/s Fibre Channel storage area networks and are fully backward compatible and interoperable with legacy 1Gb/s installations. In addition, the LP9002 enable full-duplex transfers, firmware upgradeability, and hardware context cache.
IBM’s agreement with Emulex marks the continuation of a focus by Big Blue to gain share in the storage marketplace against market leader EMC. Some of the other recent efforts IBM has made along these lines recently include the announcement of special financing arrangements for some of its storage products and the release of a new portfolio of interoperable network attached storage appliances.