Broadcom Limited announced the availability of the industry’s first Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) over Fibre Channel HBA solution. Broadcom is currently sampling this standards-based solution to OEMs on its Emulex Gen 6 Host Bus Adapters (HBAs).
NVMe over Fibre Channel builds on the performance improvements delivered by Emulex Gen 6 HBAs, which cuts latency in half versus the previous generation. The combination of Emulex Gen 6 with NVMe over Fibre Channel delivers an even greater reduction of 75% in latency versus legacy 8Gb Fibre Channel storage networks.
Fibre Channel supports both standard storage arrays and new NVMe over Fibre Channel arrays on the same fabric. The dual-mode feature provides investment protection by supporting SCSI storage arrays installed in the datacenter and new NVMe storage arrays, concurrently.
The solution is also Software Defined Storage-ready with the availability of an Software Development Kit (SDK) for Emulex HBAs that provides all the tools needed to build an NVMe external storage system based on standard server hardware.


