Converged networking solutions provider Emulex (News - Alert) has announced that it has been named a winner by the Golden Bridge Business Awards (formerly the Network Products Guide Innovation Awards) in the "Innovation in Information Technology: Convergence (News - Alert)" category for 2011.

The company won the title for the Emulex Engine (XE)201 I/O Controller, which, the company claims, is the industry's first quad-port controller unifying Fibre Channel and Ethernet. It can give OEMs the choice of 16Gb/s Fibre Channel or 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) with protocol support for RDMA over Converged Enhanced Ethernet (RoCE), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI, as well as 40Gb Ethernet (40GbE) connectivity.

"The XE201 leverages vScale, which enables up to 256 virtual functions, vPath  support for emerging I/O standards like Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) and vEngine, which reduce CPU burden on the host server by 25 percent, all functionality that truly address the promise of convergence," said Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing, Emulex, in a statement.

The XE201 supports up to four channels of 8Gb/s Fibre Channel, two channels of 16Gb/s Fibre Channel, four ports of 10GbE, one port of 40Gb Ethernet (40GbE) and combinations of the above for both server initiators and storage targets. With these features, XE201 provides an unprecedented level of flexibility and scalability for today's expanding data centers.

The Golden Bridge Awards recognize the best in organizational performance, products and services, and executives and management teams, company officials said.

Emulex delivers a broad portfolio of Fibre Channel host bus adapters, network interface cards, converged network adapters, controllers, embedded bridges and switches, and connectivity management software.

Recently, Emulex announced that its LightPulse 8Gbps fiber channel host bus adapters support Cisco (News - Alert) UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers and MDS fiber channel switches.

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