Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX) today announced the results of a lab review by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), an analyst firm specializing in the testing and analysis of specific storage-related products, which evaluated Emulex LightPulse(r) Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) within virtualized server environments. The ESG Lab report found that Emulex HBAs are optimized for the mixed workloads typically found in multiple virtual machine environments. Emulex LightPulse Virtual HBA technology is supported on Emulex's family of 4Gb/s HBAs and incorporates support for two important industry-standards: N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) and Virtual Fabric. Emulex helped pioneer the development and adoption of NPIV and continues to champion its broad deployment.

"ESG's independent review emphasizes the robust advantages that Emulex 4Gb/s LightPulse HBAs offer customers as the industry continues to adopt virtualized server environments," said Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Emulex. "These lab findings further validate the unique value that our LightPulse Virtual HBA technology brings to our customers, including the key building blocks to fully realize the benefits of server virtualization deployed in a SAN environment and extend the value of fabric virtualization."

Key findings in the ESG Lab review include:

 -- Mixed Workload Performance: 
     Virtual HBA Technology allows virtual machines with different I/O workloads to co-exist without impacting each others I/O performance. This mixed workload performance enhancement is
       crucial in consolidated, virtual environments where multiple virtual machines and applications are all accessing storage through the same set of physical HBAs. Emulex LightPulse 
       Virtual HBA technology provides best-in-class interleaving of Fibre Channel (FC) data transfers at the frame level, which results in more efficient, reliable data transfer and improved 
       performance. Frame-level multiplexing is important particularly for large payloads that are intermixed with performance sensitive transactional workloads.
 -- NPIV Support: 
     * ESG recognized that Emulex had a leading role in the development and adoption of NPIV and was the first to market with industry standard NPIV support. NPIV is a key feature of 
       Emulex LightPulse Virtual HBA technology, which supports industry standard NPIV, enabling each FC HBA to register multiple 'virtual ports' within the fabric. LightPulse Virtual 
       HBA technology allows administrators to manage storage on behalf of the virtual machine in much the same way they manage storage attached to physical machines, leveraging familiar best 
       practices and existing SAN management tools further reducing cost and complexity. 
     * As server virtualization vendors, including VMware, Microsoft and Xen, bring industry standard NPIV support to market in cooperation with Emulex, ESG Lab believes that IT managers 
       implementing server and storage consolidation plans should consider Emulex as the keystone of an emerging grid-enabled architecture. 
 -- Virtual Fabric Support: 
     * ESG also recognized in the report that the reliability and ease of use of Emulex's Virtual HBA technology is simplified by the support of the Virtual Fabric industry standard.  This standard 
       provides the ability to split up or segment a SAN into many logical SANs, each with its own set of fabric services providing improved fabric security, manageability and efficiency. 

"ESG found that Emulex HBAs are an excellent choice for applications being deployed within a virtualized server environment," said Brian Garrett, technical director of ESG Lab. "With industry leading NPIV support and an architecture optimized for mixed virtualized server workloads, Emulex enables IT administrators to maintain the same SAN best practices on virtualized servers as on traditional hardware-based servers."

The full Enterprise Strategy Group Lab Review evaluation results can by viewed at http://www.emulex.com/white/hba/esg_server_virt.pdf.