… And QLogic

QLogic Corp. announced its support for the 16Gb Fibre Channel standard which was ratified by the ANSI INCITS T11.2 Technical Committee and announced by the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA).

"QLogic is once again ready to take Fibre Channel to new heights with our fifth-generation Fibre Channel solutions and deliver the fastest storage connectivity available," said Rob Davis, vice president and chief technology officer, QLogic. "Running at 16Gb/second, our Fibre Channel switches and adapters will double the performance of today’s 8Gb Fibre Channel products making them highly appealing for our customers running bandwidth-demanding applications. To protect customers’ existing Fibre Channel investments, QLogic 16Gb Fibre Channel solutions will be fully compatible with 8Gb and 4Gb generation products from QLogic and other Fibre Channel vendors."

In addition to improved performance and backward compatibility, 16Gb Fibre Channel is expected to reduce power consumption by at least 25 percent over previous generation products in part because SAN administrators will be able to handle the same workload as two previous-generation 8Gb ports on a single 16Gb port. It also offers between 60 percent and 2X improvements in storage area network (SAN) IO density and virtual machine (VM) IO channels per port, saving PCIe slots for other uses.

The QLogic roadmap includes a number of 16Gb Fibre Channel products which are expected to be available sometime in calendar year 2011.