STORAGE NETWORKING WORLD, PHOENIX, April 5, 2004 (PRIMEZONE) -- Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX), the market leader in Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) and a leading supplier of intelligent building blocks for next generation storage networking systems, today announced support for the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) across its market-leading family of LightPulse(tm) HBAs. SMI-S is an industry-wide initiative led by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to deliver a common management interface for simplified operation and control of all the products within heterogeneous SANs.
Emulex's implementation, as demonstrated at this week's Storage Networking World Spring 2004 show with AppIQ, delivers the broadest range of capabilities in the industry, including the ability to fully configure and manage all the HBAs in a SAN from a single console. Emulex's SMI-S implementation is integrated into its operating system drivers and is fully backwards compatible with its entire installed base of more than 1.4 million Emulex HBAs. Emulex expects to deliver SMI-S compliant drivers this summer, upon completion of OEM qualifications.
"Emulex has been instrumental in driving the acceptance of an industry-standard approach to SAN management and is working closely with its partners and customers to deploy SMI-S compliant products," said Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing, Emulex Corp. "The SMI-S standard enables our SAN management partners to more quickly integrate support for HBAnyware, which ultimately benefits the end user by delivering a more robust, full-featured solution for managing large-scale, multi-vendor SANs."
At a recent SMI-Lab4 plugfest, Emulex was the industry's first HBA supplier to deliver a SMI-S HBA Provider, which leverages the comprehensive management instrumentation already built into the Emulex HBAnyware management framework. SMI-S adds an industry standard, architected interface for SAN management partners to easily integrate support for HBAnyware technology into their solutions. Emulex is showcasing its SMI-S HBA Provider in the SNIA Interoperability and Solutions Demonstration Lab at this week's SNW Spring. To reinforce the benefits of SMI-S, Emulex and storage area management software leader AppIQ have also teamed to demonstrate support for the standard. The joint demonstration, located in Emulex's booth P12, will feature AppIQ StorageAuthority(tm) Suite, an open, standards-built family of integrated SAN management and storage resource management solutions, leveraging Emulex's SMI-S HBA Provider to showcase support for Emulex LightPulse HBAs and HBAnyware management suite.
"Working with Emulex to seamlessly integrate support for its HBAs and HBAnyware management framework reinforces the compelling benefits of SMI-S for simplifying the management of heterogeneous storage environments and accelerating interoperability," said Ash Ashutosh, chief technology officer of AppIQ. "Having developed our open storage area management software on SMI-S, AppIQ can rapidly support new compliant solutions like those from Emulex, and offer enhanced management capabilities with a significant time-to-market advantage, benefiting our strategic OEMs and customers alike."
Prior to SMI-S, Emulex worked closely with its SAN management partners and the SNIA to provide support for the Common HBA API, a specification designed to provide a common interface for integrating support for Fibre Channel HBAs. SMI-S changes the management paradigm by not only allowing for partners to take advantage of the flexibility and functionality of Emulex HBAs within their applications, but also allowing for a common management interface for all products within a SAN. Since SMI-S extends the benefits of a common management interface to include all the products within a SAN, Emulex's support for SMI-S is critical.
About HBAnyware
Emulex's HBAnyware is a centralized HBA management suite that dramatically simplifies SAN management and lowers total cost of ownership. It enables complete management of Emulex HBAs anywhere in a SAN from a single console, including advanced capabilities such as remote firmware upgrade and dynamic driver configuration. Emulex's HBAnyware complements third party management applications and enables cost-effective and scalable solutions that are critical to the efficient operation of enterprise-class SANs. Additionally, HBAnyware leverages Emulex's unique HBA architectural capabilities including firmware upgradeability and driver compatibility across product generations to further reduce planned downtime and improve IT management productivity.
About AppIQ
AppIQ(tm), Inc. is a leading provider of enterprise Storage Area Network (SAN) management and Storage Resource Management (SRM) solutions. AppIQ StorageAuthority(tm) Suite is "Enabling the storage utility"(tm) for today's data-intensive enterprise by seamlessly integrating storage resource visualization, provisioning, monitoring, reporting, and policy-based automation, and by correlating the availability of business-critical applications with SAN configuration, capacity and performance. AppIQ products are sold across all continents directly and through a network of strategic OEMs and resellers. Customers worldwide in almost every industry rely on AppIQ software to reduce operational costs and improve business performance. AppIQ is a privately held company based in Burlington, Mass. For more information, visit http://www.appiq.com.
About Emulex
Emulex Corporation is the world leader in Fibre Channel HBAs and delivers a broad range of intelligent building blocks for next generation storage networking systems. Emulex was named one of Forbes Magazine's 25 Fastest Growing Technology Companies, and ranked number 15 in Deloitte & Touche's 2003 Technology Fast 50.
The world's leading server and storage providers rely on Emulex HBAs, embedded storage switching and I/O controller products to build reliable, scalable and high performance storage solutions. The Emulex award-winning product families, including its LightPulse(tm) HBAs and InSpeed(tm) embedded storage switching products, are based on internally developed ASIC, firmware and software technologies, and offer customers high performance, scalability, flexibility and reduced total cost of ownership. The company's products have been selected by the world's leading server and storage providers, including Dell, EMC, Fujitsu Ltd., Fujitsu Siemens, Groupe Bull, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, NEC, Network Appliance, Quantum Corp., StorageTek, Sun Microsystems, Unisys and Xyratex. In addition, Emulex includes industry leaders Brocade, Computer Associates, Intel, McDATA, Microsoft and VERITAS among its strategic partners. Corporate headquarters are located in Costa Mesa, California. News releases and other information about Emulex Corporation are available at http://www.emulex.com.
EMULEX -- We network storage
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