The introduction of the HP 8Gb PCIe Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) brings datacenter infrastructure components to a higher level of performance and efficiency. The HP 8Gb PCIe FC HBAs are priced only slightly higher than an equivalent 4Gb HBA, yet, they have the ability to deliver twice the I/O performance. In addition, an 8Gb FC HBA purchased today is backward compatible with 4Gb and 2Gb and will protect your investment longer than if you were to purchase an equivalent 4Gb HBA. If you are using storage intensive applications, such as backup / restore, database transactions, and rich media, the increased performance of the 8Gb infrastructure allows you to store and retrieve critical information faster.

The virtualization of servers has become an important capability for most datacenters. The ability to improve overall server utilization, resulting in significant cost savings, has made server virtualization a "must-have" for most enterprises. By having an HBA that supports and maximizes your server virtualization efforts, you are protecting your significant investments in virtualization technology.
Since most of today's datacenters are required to be available 24 X 7, it is critical that infrastructure components have failover capabilities. By installing redundant HBAs into your servers, you can feel confident that your servers will remain connected to mission-critical stored data.

Finally, today's enterprises are becoming more and more sensitive to the power consumption within the datacenter. The 8Gb PCIe FC HBAs provide a number of features that work together to reduce power consumption, thus delivering a "green" benefit within the server.