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Broadcom Emulex Gen 7 FC HBA has Significantly

Improved Performance over Gen 6

Gen 7 FC HBA

Data centers are undergoing a transformation with the emergence of all-

flash arrays (AFAs), faster media types and more efficient ways to access

media. These forms of storage deliver record speeds and lower latencies

to significantly improve application performance. One key technology that

is driving this rapid evolution is NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). Swift

speeds have proven the value of running AFAs over Fabrics, and now

networking HBA’s are being further developed to avoid bottlenecking

performance. The latest storage networking standard, Gen 7 FC (Fibre

Channel) HBA, provides the ideal combination of performance

improvements plus features to support this data center transformation,

while maintaining backward compatibility with existing Fibre Channel

infrastructure.

These bold claims of performance, security and efficiency improvements

over the previous generation compelled Dell EMC to dive deeper, in hopes

that our latest PowerEdge products would utilize Gen 7 to achieve

significant read/write IOPS (I/O Operations per Second) within a flash-

oriented datacenter. To determine the latency and read/write performance

advantages compared to its Gen 6 predecessor, three tests were

conducted with the newest Emulex Gen 7 LPe35000-series HBAs (Host

Bus Adapters) by Broadcom.

Tech Note by

Matt Ogle

Brent Mosbrook

Summary

As the adoption of All-Flash

Arrays (AFA) over Fabric for

the public cloud continues

to grow, server HBA

standards must steadily rise

to ensure maximum

workload performance and

security are intact.

Dell EMC and Broadcom

have partnered together to

test the new Gen 7 Emulex

HBA and compare its

performance to the

previous generation.

The results serve to be a

reminder that data center

networking can quickly and

critically impact system

performance in our rapidly

evolving technical climate.

Direct from Development

Server and Infrastructure

Engineering

Figure 1: Emulex Gen 7 LPe35000-series LPe35002

Summary of content (3 pages)

PAGE 1
Direct from Development Server and Infrastructure Engineering Broadcom Emulex Gen 7 FC HBA has Significantly Improved Performance over Gen 6 Tech Note by Matt Ogle Brent Mosbrook Summary As the adoption of All-Flash Arrays (AFA) over Fabric for the public cloud continues to grow, server HBA standards must steadily rise to ensure maximum workload performance and security are intact.
PAGE 2
Test Procedure and Results To measure Gen 7 HBAs latency improvement, two important interfaces of the HBA were prepared: The Fiber Channel port as it connects to the SAN, and the PCIe interface of the host computer. Two protocol logic analyzers were used on each connection with synchronized clocks to ensure that both analyzers measured the timing of a full iteration (from when a FC frame is received at the HBA FC port until it was converted to the PCIe protocol).
PAGE 3
Additional Improvements to Gen 7 • • • Trunking: Supports up to 64GFC on a single port by aggregating multiple physical ports to form a single, logical, extremely high-bandwidth port. Supports PCIe 4.0: Gen 7 is the first HBA with PCIe 4.0 supporting 2x the bit transfer rate compared to PCIe 3.0 Enhanced security with support for Dell Cyber-resiliency: Checks for authentic firmware every time the system is booted and before installing any new firmware.