In unveiling the slew of new solutions at its Tech Forum conference in Las Vegas this week, HP said it was building on its Converged Infrastructure strategy. The new products included seven ProLiant G7 server blades, with the vendor boasting their high I/O scalability, which in tandem with their 2 terabyte memory and I/O scalability would be able to support "up to four times more virtual machines than competitive blades, while requiring 66 percent less hardware."

One of the technologies enabling the two new FlexFabric 10 Gb adapters in HP's new blades is the OneConnect Universal Converged Network Adapter technology created by the Costa Mesa, Calif.-based company called Emulex.

Together with UCNA, Emulex's Universal Local Area Network on Motherboard technology enables running 10 GbE and FCoE or iSCSI simultaneously, enabling the network convergence that is part of HP's message.

According to Emulex's VP of Corporate Marketing Shaun Welsch, the technology has also enabled the servers to take less power. The previous blade's LOM (LAN on motherboard) would take six watts and the NIC (network interface controller) would take 11 watts, he said. The integrated FlexFabric adapter takes seven watts of power, while delivering 40 Gbps throughput.

The adapter doubles performance, while reducing power usage by 60 percent. "Those to me are the most compelling pieces, because you're using less equipment to do more work," Welsch said.

The converged LOM technology included in the new FlexFabric adapter is an industry first, according to Welsch.

The technology also allows to reduce the amount of mezzanine cards, switches and cabling required in a network. Instead of having four switches to provide six NIC's and two FCoE port connections to the server, the two 10 GbE adapters can be connected to two switches.


The transition to next-generation networking, according to Emulex