Network News: Emulex, Avaya, EMC, Gigamon

Here's our review of noteworthy links for the data center industry for May 3rd:

Emulex Unveils New Architecture for Network Convergence - Networking equipment vendor Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX) this week announced the Emulex Connect Architecture (ECA), a three-year roadmap addressing the connectivity needs for end users and server and storage Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). In addition, Emulex also announced OEM sampling of the Emulex Engine (XE)201 I/O Controller, the industry's first quad-port converged fabric controller unifying Fibre Channel and Ethernet. The Emulex Connect Architecture encompasses the evolving requirements for cloud and data center connectivity, including I/O virtualization, scalability and management capabilities.

Avaya expands network portfolio - Avaya will showcase new data networking solutions at Interop Las Vegas next week that allow customers to simplify the design, deployment, and management of data centers and next generation networks. As a part of their Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA) will show the VSP 7000, a data center grade high-density 10 GbE top-of-rack switch and a Virtual Provisioning Service (VPS) that will provide integration of application virtualization and network virtualization. In addition to new data solutions, Avaya announced an enhanced suite of turnkey and standalone professional services that will help customers and business partners easily enable Avaya VENA in the data center and campus. "With VENA, Avaya enables a consistent enterprise-wide architecture that lets IT decide how far and how quickly they want to extend virtualization across their networks. The introduction of the Avaya VSP 7000 is significant as the company continues to deliver against the Avaya VENA roadmap—it gives Avaya a competitive edge with a complete portfolio of core and top-of-rack data center switches," said Zeus Kerravala, distinguished research fellow and senior VP at Yankee Group.

EMC delivers 16 Gigabit Fibre Channel - EMC announced that its EMC Connectrix family will be the first to offer 16 gigabits per second (Gbps) Fibre Channel switching technology. Based on new technology from Brocade (BRCD) the new EMC Connectrix 16 Gbps solutions will enable end-to-end Fibre Channel solution giving scalability, high-performance and operational simplicity. "A comprehensive portfolio that is purpose-built for virtualization and clouds, the new 16 Gbps switching technology strengthens EMC's joint fabric solutions and perfectly complements our cloud vision – to help businesses around the world make their data centers more efficient, cost-effective and agile," said EMC's Paul Brown, Vice President and general manager, Storage Networking Business, EMC. "The portfolio extends the choice of EMC newest technologies that allow thousands of customers to increase virtualization levels and drive the migration to the cloud." The new 16 Gbps FC Connectrix will be available within 90 days.

Gigamon Announces GigaVUE HD8 Data Access Switch - Gigamon has released GigaVUE-HD8, the first offering in the company's GigaVUE H series of intelligent data access switches. The GigaVUE-HD8 appliance provides network visibility and data access to high-density environments at speeds of 1G, 10G, and beyond. The HD8 appliance replicates and filters network traffic to monitoring and security tools at speeds of 1G and10G, and is designed to support faster speeds as they reach industry adoption. At higher speeds, tools that provide essential network monitoring and security functions become less efficient, limiting the visibility which large network operators require to maintain operations.