QLogic Begins Production Shipments of 32Gb FC Adapters

Qlogic Corp. began production shipments of his Gen 6 (32Gb) FC adapters.

The 2700 Series adapters enable virtualization density and improved database performance, combined with increased operational efficiency. Firm’s Gen 6 FC Adapters, which OEMs have been testing since October 2014, not only deliver enhanced performance, but also provide unsurpassed reliability and resiliency.

“FC is an inherently secure and reliable data network,” said Vikram Karvat, VP, products, marketing and planning, QLogic. “The new QLogic Gen 6 FC Adapters build on this foundation, delivering unsurpassed value by enabling enterprise applications to meet peak demand, minimizing downtime, and further simplifying SAN administration. Additionally, as we look forward, the industry is defining Gen 7 FC, providing continued investment protection to enterprise data centers for many years to come.“

The 2700 Series Gen 6 FC adapters accelerate enterprise applications, deliver a highly resilient infrastructure and optimize IT staff productivity.

• Accelerating enterprise applications

  • The firm’s Gen 6 FC adapters deliver up to an 80% increase in I/O operations per second (IO/s) for typical database block sizes, reducing query times for large databases, and enabling more rapid business decision making when compared to Gen 5 (16Gb) FC. ⁽¹⁾

  • Delivering up to 2.6 million IO/s and 24,000MB per second of throughput, the company’s Gen 6 FC adapters are ideally suited for environments utilizing next-generation flash-based storage. With a fully offloaded protocol stack, these adapters operate with the lowest CPU utilization of any block storage technology in the industry.

• Delivering highly resilient infrastructure

  • Firm’s StorFusion technology provides forward error correction (FEC), which automatically corrects transmission errors and improves network resiliency.

  • Unique port isolation technology allows linear performance scaling across ports and increased reliability under adverse conditions.

  • Gen 6 FC performance reduces backup windows allowing organizations to more effectively meet RTOs.

• Optimizing IT staff productivity

  • The 2700 Series Gen 6 FC adapters deliver a suite of accelerated deployment and diagnostic features for improved SAN manageability, and end-to-end QoS for enhanced performance and improved service-level agreements (SLAs).

  • Leveraging software-defined, fabric-assigned port worldwide name (FA-WWN) and boot from SAN configurations, StorFusion technology can improve server deployment and replacement by up to 75%. ⁽²⁾

  • Backward compatibility with two previous generations of FC from a software, tools and infrastructure perspective reduces the complexity of deploying, administering and managing the SAN, while supporting an incremental upgrade strategy.

The 2700 Series Gen 6 FC Adapters are available, in single, dual and quad-port options. Additionally, the 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 FC adapters, which were announced in October of 2015, have been augmented with new single and dual-port options.

“The introduction of the new Brocade G620 switch with Gen 6 Fabric Vision technology and QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 FC Adapters provides our mutual customers with breakthrough and unmatched reliability that they have come to expect from their mission-critical application infrastructure,” said Jack Rondoni, VP, storage networking, Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. “Our partnership with QLogic will continue to enable ongoing storage innovation and investment protection for next generation storage architectures.“

“The introduction of the next generation in FC speeds and features will continue to propel the FC market forward,” said Seamus Crehan, president, Crehan Research Inc. “QLogic’s timing in bringing Gen 6 FC products to market should help its long-time leadership position in the industry, as it enables customers to build safe, dependable, software-defined storage networks at even greater speeds.“

“The SAN market is evolving due to emerging storage solutions like all-flash arrays and software-defined storage,” said Sameh Boujelbene, director, controller and adapter and server market research, Dell’Oro Group. “Next generation FC products are needed in order to address these trends with increased performance, resiliency and operational efficiency.“

“The storage landscape is trending toward a flash-centric world. Our VNX all-flash and hybrid storage arrays, powered by QLogic Gen 5 FC technology, give EMC customers an infrastructure that can consolidate multiple workloads and handle unpredictable IT environments,” said Pierluca Chiodelli, senior director, product management and customer operations, EMC Corporation. “The combination of QLogic’s next generation 2700 Series Adapters and our unified VNX platform will offer customers a flexible solution that delivers industry-leading innovation and enterprise capabilities.“

“As legacy SANs become increasingly more complex, customers are seeking out solutions that address current and future requirements,” said Marty Lans, senior director, storage interoperability and connectivity engineering, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). “QLogic and HPE have a longstanding partnership designed around intelligent integration, such as with our Smart SAN and Express Writes Technology. The transition to Gen 6 FC technology will be important as we continue to develop our HPE 3PAR StoreServ all-flash array portfolio and HPE StoreOnce data protection solutions, which require more bandwidth and higher IO/s.“

“QLogic’s new Gen 6 FC 2700 Series Adapters improve the connection bandwidth and I/O throughput between servers and FC storage, delivering higher performance and enabling more efficient and stable storage connection solutions for mission-critical server systems,” said Qiu Long, GM, server domain, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

“The storage networking market is ready to make the transition to 32Gb FC driven by SSD bandwidth and latency requirements, having recently completed the transition to 16Gb FC,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., research director, Data Center, cloud and SDN, IHS Technology. “QLogic with the 2700 Series is well positioned to participate in this market transition.“

“As a customer-centric IT provider, Lenovo looks to our technology partners to help us deliver comprehensive and value add products,” saidKamran Amini, executive director, enterprise business group, Lenovo Co., Ltd. “QLogic is a strong partner for us with innovative products, like its Gen 6 FC technology. These products will provide our customers with long-term, scalable solutions for the fast growing converged and hyper-converged markets in the U.S. and abroad.“

“NetApp All Flash Arrays are increasingly connected to fast, reliable SAN solutions as enterprises race to deliver actionable business results,” saidLee Caswell, VP, product, solutions and services marketing, NetApp, Inc. “We look forward to building on our partnership with QLogic to help customers further realize the benefits of flash performance for high-performance workloads.“

“Leveraging next generation FC connectivity from QLogic provides maximum performance and throughput for applications running on FlashArray//m,” said Matt Kixmoeller, VP, products, Pure Storage, Inc. “Partnering with QLogic helps us continue to deliver unprecedented speed, scale and simplicity to our customers with all-flash.“

“We worked closely with QLogic to develop our new VirutaLUN 7.4 storage emulation software which supports 32Gb FC speeds, as well as other key unique features that provide a cost effective, scalable and easily deployable solution for storage networking development and testing,” said Vince Asbridge, director, software engineering, SANBlaze Technology, Inc. “As an early adopter of 32Gb FC, it was important for us to partner with the industry leader, QLogic. Our relationship with QLogic has proved invaluable and we’re looking forward to seeing what comes next.“

“The explosive growth and increasing value of data is driving the need for flash-based storage in the enterprise,” said Sudhir Prasad, senior director, product management, Violin Memory, Inc. “QLogic’s new 2700 Series Adapters will not only support these workloads now, but also scale with future demand, effectively simplifying SAN management and providing ultimate performance and resiliency.“

“Virtualization has redefined data center infrastructure and led to hyper-convergence,” said Howard Hall, senior director, global technology partners organization, Vmware, Inc. “enterprise storage solutions are important components of these hyper-converged infrastructures and require reliable, high-performance storage connectivity solutions such as QLogic’s new 2700 Series Gen 6 FC Adapters for their business-critical applications.”

⁽¹⁾ The Performance Benefits of Gen 6 FC – March 2016
⁽²⁾ ESG, QLogic 2600 Series 16Gb Gen 5 FC Adapter with Brocade Fabric, August 2015