Dell Emulex LPe31002-M6-D Dual-Port 16Gbps Fibre Channel HBA

Dell Emulex FC HBA — Dual-Port 16Gbps Fibre Channel for PowerEdge SAN

The Dell Emulex FC HBA based on the LPe31002-M6-D chipset is a professional Fibre Channel host bus adapter for PowerEdge servers in SAN storage environments. Fibre Channel is the primary SAN protocol in South African enterprise data centres where consistent low latency, deterministic throughput and mature management tooling are non-negotiable requirements for mission-critical workloads.

Each port of the Dell Emulex FC HBA delivers 16Gbps to the Fibre Channel fabric. Auto-negotiation covers 16G, 8G and 4G fabric speeds. Compatibility with mixed or legacy environments is maintained without requiring a full fabric upgrade. The PCIe 3.0 x8 host interface ensures combined 32Gbps across both ports is never bottlenecked at the server.

Dual Fabric Multipath Architecture

In standard SAN deployments, a dual-port HBA provides redundant paths to storage. One port connects to Fabric A and the second connects to Fabric B. Multipathing software such as VMware NMP or Linux DM-Multipath aggregates these paths. It provides load balancing and automatic failover between both fabrics. A single Dell Emulex FC HBA handles both paths. This reduces PCIe slot consumption compared to using two single-port adapters.

Driver Support and Management

The Emulex LPe31002 has native driver support in VMware ESXi, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux across current OS versions. Dell OpenManage surfaces HBA health, port link status and error statistics through the same management console used for all PowerEdge hardware. iDRAC generates HBA fault events for centralised alerting in both connected and out-of-band management scenarios.

The Dell Emulex FC HBA is available from Briggi Tech with nationwide delivery to South African organisations.

Browse all server HBAs at Briggi Tech or check compatibility at Dell.