It was perhaps inevitable for Emulex to take on also routing, after extending from the traditional HBA domain to embedded switches, fabric switches and I/O controllers.The company opens this new product line with two units that bear telling but somewhat uninspired names: Emulex Storage Router 725 and 735. I am not raising any flag here: considering that in January Emulex was celebrating the shipment of more than 10 million ports of InSpeed embedded storage switches, it’s safe to assume that its customers are not intrigued just by fancy product names.The 725 and the 735 look pretty much the same because these two 1U routers share the same chassis and have the same line up of connections. However, you would use the 725 to connect servers to the fabric without installing expensive FC HBAs: a GbE port or two, built in in most machines is all what’s needed after you install the router.Isn’t the 725 a self defeating strategy for a company like Emulex that sells also FC HBAs? Perhaps, but other vendors are selling similar routers already (check out for example this week’s Storage Insider), so proposing the 725 Emulex is reclaiming its market share in that segment.By contrast, the 735, which is an FCIP (FC over IP) router, brings Emulex products into the all new segment of connecting remote fabrics. Using built in hardware-based compression the 735 should easily saturate a T3, according to Emulex. Virtualization, N-port ID virtualization or NPIV to be accurate, is another new frontier that Emulex has been patrolling for about a year, I believe.In plain English, NPIV means creating a virtual HBA for a virtual machine in environment such as VMWare ESX or Xen 3. In fact, at the recent CeBIT in Hannover, Emulex and Novell put up a demo of NPIV involving the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, LightPulse HBAs and Xen 3.However interesting, that technology is still work in progress, I learned during a recent conversation with director of product marketing John Chevalier, which is not a surprise considering that systems’ virtualization is struggling to acquire a well deserved but still controversial space in the enterprise. But I am digressing: This is a topic for perhaps another place, another time.