Demartek Evaluation of Gen 6 Fibre Channel Products from Emulex and Brocade
1 March 2016
Large enterprises choose Fibre Channel (FC) storage networking because of its proven performance, reliability and scalability for mission-critical workloads. Fibre Channel is seeing renewed interest from customers who have deployed other storage technologies. This comes as no surprise since Fibre Channel was purpose-built for storage — it delivers consistently high performance, does not drop packets, and has deep ecosystem support from all of the major operating system (OS) and hypervisor vendors.
Enterprise datacenters are increasingly turning to solid-state (flash) storage to improve storage performance, and they most frequently select Fibre Channel as the host interface to meet their flash storage requirements. In many cases, however, deploying solid-state storage moves the performance bottleneck to the storage network. This situation often drives users to push for higher performance from their storage network infrastructure.
The sixth generation of Fibre Channel is aimed at satisfying the needs of growing deployments of flash storage, hyper-scale virtualization, and new high-speed data center architectures such as NVMe.
Demartek gained early access to the newest Gen 6 (32GFC) products from Emulex and Brocade, and subjected them to a series of SQL Server data warehousing application tests. We found that the new Emulex Gen 6 HBAs and Brocade Gen 6 switches provide the performance needed to alleviate network bottlenecks that can be caused by all-flash arrays and dramatically improve data warehousing application performance. New features boost reliability and deliver a suite of diagnostic, troubleshooting and deployment features.