"Just as storage has gone through a consolidation period and servers have gone through consolidation with virtualization and blades, we're starting to see the same thing happen with networks," said Sean Walsh, Emulex's vice president of corporate marketing.

Emulex is claiming its OneConnect UCNA can provide up to 28% savings on the switches, network adapters and rack space required, 42% savings on power and cooling, and 80% savings on cabling because it can transport storage and LAN traffic over one wire.

"As virtualization is using up the CPU resources that used to be available for running software drivers and that sort of thing, and as you aggregate I/O with eight or 10 of these machines running on a single blade, you're 1Gbit/sec. iSCSI or even 2Gbit/sec. or 4Gbit/sec. Fibre Channel isn't going to be enough," Walsh said. "You're going to need higher bandwidth. Obviously, if you're doing this over networks, you're going to need higher network connectivity."

Walsh placed the UCNA in the same category of SAN/LAN convergence products as , which also consolidates Ethernet and Fibre Channel traffic and is targeted at virtual server infrastructures.

, founder and consulting analyst with , said LAN/SAN technology is still far from being adopted in the data center.