QLogic 16Gb FC Powering NEC M Series Storage Arrays

QLogic Corporation, a specialist in FC adapters, announced that its FlexSuite technology is the exclusive 16Gb Gen 5FC connectivity solution for NEC iStorage M500 and M700 disk arrays.

   M700

Gen 5FC technology is designed into the iStorage M500 and M700 solutions as a storage target controller and enables enterprise I/O performance, low latency and HA.

Growing collaboration efforts with NEC Corporation continue to demonstrate QLogic’s increasing commitment to delivering the latest, enterprise storage connectivity solutions to growing IT markets in Japan and around the globe.

“The operational efficiency and unmatched reliability of NEC M Series SAN storage solutions is ideal for the mission-critical business applications, highly virtualised data centre environments and private cloud installations of our enterprise customers,” said Tetsuyuki Hishikawa, director engineering, RAID products development management, storage system department, IT platform division, NEC. “QLogic engineers API compatibility across generations of products for seamless migrations, resulting in faster time-to-market and easier deployments. This approach allows NEC to take advantage of previous testing to qualify systems in a timelier manner for production. By partnering with the industry leader in FC, we ensure our customers will experience the same, enterprise, high-performance and reliability that QLogic has built their reputation upon.”

Gen 5 FC delivers performance and reliability
Gen 5 FC technology handles three times the transactions (1.2 Million IO/s) and double the bi-directional throughput (1600 MBps) compared to 8Gb FC, and is 40% faster than 10GbE, increasing application performance by reducing the time to transfer data between server and storage. QLogic Gen 5 FC dual-port technology is designed with the company’s multi-port traffic isolation feature for greater reliability and security on dual-port implementations. This architecture, complete with on-chip CPU and memory isolation across both ports of the adapter, ensures that if one port should encounter issues, the second, isolated port will continue to function securely and without interruption. With two independent channels, I/O imbalances, error recovery or firmware updates on one port do not impact the second port. This enables secure, deterministically predictive and scalable port performance and increased reliability, features that are essential for enterprise data centres needing the highest levels of availability for mission-critical applications.

iStorage M500 and M700 Disk Arrays powered by QLogic double the performance of previous-generation FC storage networking solutions, allowing enterprises to improve price-performance, reduce power consumption-per-gigabit, and deliver HA to support business continuance. Gen 5 FC technology is backward-compatible with 8Gb and 4Gb FC storage networking solutions, helping to preserve SAN infrastructure investments while delivering the ultimate in performance.

“QLogic Gen 5 FC technology delivers the high-end connectivity performance that NEC M Series storage users require to support highly virtualised data centres and cloud deployments,” said Vikram Karvat, VP marketing, QLogic. “Rapidly changing demands on enterprise storage are fueling the adoption of Gen 5 FC because it delivers required scalability, performance and reliability. Our continued collaboration with NEC enhances our already strong presence in Japan.“