News

posted on 25 June 2008 08:57

It had to happen: Brocade enters the cosy duoploly HBA world of Emulex and QLogic and ... The Empire Strikes Back as Emulex publishes an independent testing report saying its HBAs are better, much better than those from Brocade. Pshaw!

Demartek, an independent analysis and lab validation testing firm, compared Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) to Brocade's HBA products and found that overall, Emulex HBAs are more feature-rich, are designed for more scalable management, provide broader support, and have stronger performance.

Mike Smith,Emulex' world-wide marketing EVP, got the result he might have wished for: "Demartek's evaluation is evidence of our strength in providing industry-leading HBAs that offer the strongest performance, interoperability and backwards compatibility with existing and next-generation data centre solutions. Combining our experience, field-proven reliability and market strength makes Emulex LightPulse HBAs the clear choice for IT managers."

The Demartek report included topics such as:

- Emulex HBAs and drivers are qualified and supported by all the major server, operating system and storage vendors and are widely available through retail channels, whereas Brocade's HBAs are only available through retail channels and offer very limited support.

- Installing the Brocade HBAs required two separate installation procedures and more interaction by the SAN administrator than with the Emulex HBAs.

-  Emulex HBAs outperformed the Brocade HBAs for single- and dual-channel configurations for all block sizes in a basic performance test using a Brocade Silkworm switch.

- Emulex's HBA management suite, HBAnyware, is more intuitive, streamlined and customisable than Brocade's Enterprise Server Connectivity Manager (ESCM).

- Emulex HBAs are certified to work with all the major multipathing solutions in the market today from server, storage and operating system vendors. Comparatively, Brocade HBAs do not have any major complete server-to-storage multipathing solution certifications.

Dennis Martin, Denmartek president, was partisan in his conclusions: "Emulex's breadth and depth of experience in Fibre Channel technology was obvious in this evaluation, as its HBAs proved to have broad industry reach, robust performance and proven reliability."

The full evaluation results can be downloaded below. Somebody is bound to suggest that the test results were bought and paid for.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}

Download file: Demartek_Emulex_HBA_Evaluation_and_Comparison_with_Brocade_HBA_WhitePaper_2008-05.pdf