Emulex Corporation announced that the readers of Storage Magazine have voted its OneConnect(TM) OCe11000 family of Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) as the Connectivity Product of the Year. Voted for by the readers of the magazine, The Storries VIII (The Storage Awards 2011) recognise the products, services and companies which have most impressed readers throughout the last year. Emulex was selected by readers as a finalist in five categories.

Emulex was presented with the award at "The Storries VIII Awards" ceremony on the 23rd of June. Emulex's OneConnect technology was also honoured in the same category last year, in addition to being named 2010 Product of the Year.

Emulex's single-chip, high-performance OneConnect UCNAs enable the efficient consolidation of network and storage infrastructures. The new OCe11000 family of UCNAs was selected as connectivity product of the year based on customer's recognition of benefits such as:

-- Lower OPEX with Power Savings: Increased integration and reductions in external chip components provide a 20% improvement in power efficiency.

-- More Virtual Machines (VMs) per CPU with Emulex vEngine Technology: Emulex vEngine provides full hardware protocol offload support for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) which removes the overhead of network and storage traffic from the CPU.

-- Next Generation Virtual Networking: The OCe11000 family supports emerging VEPA (Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator), VEB (Virtual Ethernet Bridge) and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) standards. With these capabilities, the adapter functions as a Layer 2 hardware switch to offload network-based management of VM traffic and optimize performance for applications running on virtualised servers.

-- Optimised Networking Performance: Using Class 2 switch capabilities to classify and sort incoming traffic, OneConnect adapters support virtual queue technologies that fully enable 10GbE network bandwidth.

"We're honoured to once again be recognized by our customers through the Storries Awards," said Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing. "These awards demonstrate that the IT community continues to focus on data centre consolidation and virtualisation, and Emulex's OneConnect OCe11000 UCNAs help data centre managers meet these goals with denser VM capabilities, improved power usage and streamlined network performance."