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Emulex Eyes 'Sexy' SSDs

Emulex fleshed out its plans for "sexy" emerging technologies such as solid state disks (SSDs), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE), and 8-Gbit/s Fibre Channel during its annual analyst event in New York today.

This is a very interesting time in the industry,” explained Jeff Benck, the Emulex COO. “We have often heard the storage segment called the ‘snorage’ segment, but in the next few years, there’s an enormous amount of changes that will occur.”

SSDs, in particular, are gaining momentum as a fast-access alternative to traditional magnetic or optical media. Earlier this year, for example, EMC became the first mainstream storage vendor to throw its weight behind SSDs by offering the drives on its Symmetrix systems.

“I think that [SSD] is going to be a significant change in storage technologies, and we’re watching that closely,” added Benck, who joined Emulex from rival QLogic earlier this month.

Specifically, Emulex is building a version of its Fibre-Channel-to-SATA bridge technology for SSDs. “We’re engaged with multiple large OEMs, making their SSDs look like Fibre Channel drives,” explained Bob Whitson, general manager of Emulex’s embedded storage products.

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