Emulex Corporation today announced the results of an independent evaluation report that compares the performance of Emulex HBAs to that of QLogic HBAs in VMware ESX virtualized server environments. The report by Demartek, a firm specializing in independent analysis and lab verification testing of server, storage and security technologies, found that overall, Emulex HBAs outperformed QLogic HBAs in 2K, 4K and 8K block sizes with four guest operating systems running in a VMware environment. Several characteristics were measured, including I/Os per second (IOPS) and Megabytes per second.

"Demartek's independent analysis validates Emulex performance leadership for VMware ESX virtual server environments," said Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Emulex. "When you couple performance leadership with manageability, reliability and our virtualization leadership, Emulex becomes the obvious choice for VMware customers."

The Emulex HBAs were up to 9% faster in read IOPS, 31% faster in write IOPS and 31% faster in total throughput at these block sizes referenced. These block sizes in particular are commonly used by Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases.

"Our findings indicate that in an I/O intensive production environment, which includes mixed read/write loads and typically 8K block sizes, Emulex HBAs perform better, which can directly contribute to supporting more Virtual Machine instances than QLogic HBAs," said Dennis Martin, president of Demartek. "For end-users, this means superior data throughput for SAN-attached storage."

The full Demartek HBA evaluation results can by viewed here or at www.demartek.com.