QLogic 10GbE iSCSI Router Available Through EMC

Continuing to expand its footprint across storage, server and data networking markets, QLogic Corp. announced that its new 6250 intelligent Storage Router (iSR6250) is EMC E-Lab Qualified and available through the EMC Select program as a 10GbE iSCSI connectivity solution for EMC CLARiiON storage environments. The QLogic iSR6250 establishes a new design and throughput paradigm for intelligent routing platforms and features a radical architecture that can aggregate up to 1,000 iSCSI hosts to a single EMC CLARiiON storage array.
 
“Customers are assessing their IT environments in an effort to do more with less,” said Deirdre Wassell, director, Storage Product Marketing, EMC Corporation. “The EMC E-Lab qualified iSR6250 router, coupled with EMC CLARiiON, provides customers with the flexibility of high performance 10Gb iSCSI environments alongside existing high performance storage area networks for more highly available virtual machines on the network allowing for massive consolidation in virtualized environments, such as VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V.”
 
By incorporating four ports each of 10GbE iSCSI and 8Gb/sec Fibre Channel, the QLogic iSR6250 offers the latest interfaces and powerful connectivity features in EMC storage environments. The iSR6250 helps customers to cost-effectively scale blade servers and rack servers in a variety of applications including virtual machine deployments with EMC CLARiiON storage and provides high performance, cost-effective 10GbE iSCSI host connectivity to EMC CLARiiON storage arrays. In virtual machine environments, the iSR6250 enables iSCSI initiators to runs on a guest OS instead of the hypervisor and ensures that each VM manages its own storage LUNs via its own iSCSI initiator, providing dedicated resources and security for individual applications.
 
“The bottom line business impact of this announcement is that customers can utilize existing hardware and initiate an aggressive VMware strategy with minimal change in Fibre Channel storage infrastructure,” said Dave Vellante, president and co-founder of Wikibon, the world’s first Web 2.0 technology research and advisory community. “To IT management and EMC CLARiiON customers, this technology allows better leverage on existing Fibre Channel assets in VMware environments. What’s more, the fact that this is 10GbE means it will support future investments.”
 
The industry-leading architecture features two hot-replaceable router blades – which can be zoned for full redundancy or utilized for separate applications – and two hot-replaceable power modules for a fully redundant, high-availability design. The iSR6250 architecture features adaptive tuning technology that enables the system to self-configure itself following the immediate removal of any hot-replaceable components, ensuring no manual intervention is required from end-users. If a router blade is removed and replaced, it is quickly rebooted within sixty seconds and all zoning and configuration data is automatically loaded.
 
By connecting the iSR6250 to a standard 10Gb Ethernet inter-switch link (ISL) or switch port, the router can aggregate up to 1,000 iSCSI hosts to a Fibre Channel storage array, allowing higher degrees of storage consolidation and enabling more SAN storage to be available for internal and external clouds.
 
“The 10GbE iSCSI storage ports and initiator virtualization capabilities of the iSR6250 make it possible for 1,000 virtual machines to directly manage their own storage on a single EMC CLARiiON storage array,” said Shishir Shah, vice president and general manager, Storage Solutions Group, QLogic. “We look forward to collaborating with EMC to provide CLARiiON customers with the latest and most advanced iSCSI connectivity solution on the market today.”
 
QLogic iSR6250:
Elevating the Standard for Intelligent Routers
With servers with 10GbE LAN on motherboard (LOM) on the horizon, EMC CLARiiON users can use the iSR6250 to create high-speed access from applications to data storage. The iSR6250 provides three core capabilities that leverage the benefits and investments that businesses have made in storage area networks (SANs). First, the iSR6250 enables every server and virtual machine in the enterprise to connect to the SAN with its own initiator, which greatly simplifies configuration, management and security issues for IT personnel. Second, all Fibre Channel SAN devices become multi-protocol devices, via iSCSI, providing significantly increased asset utilization and increasing business efficiency. Third, the iSR6250’s high availability architecture enables enterprise-class any-to-any protocol routing, with up to 2,400 MB/s of sustained throughput and over 240,000 IOPS of peak performance available throughout the SAN. Based on the same proven QLogic ASIC technology that powers more than 50 million storage products sold by leading storage vendors worldwide, the iSR6250 offers unparalleled levels of performance, scalability, flexibility and compatibility with existing SANs with two 10GbE iSCSI Ports, two 8Gb/sec Fibre Channel Ports, two 1GbE iSCSI Ports and two management ports, per blade.