QLogic Adding 8Gb FC Mezzanine Adapter

Qlogic Corp. announced a FC adapter designed for use in Open Compute Project servers.

The QLogic QOE2562 8Gb FC mezzanine adapter brings security, performance and reliability and manageability to OCP data centers. Founded by Facebook in 2011, the OCP is an initiative designed to increase technology efficiencies and reduce the environmental impact of data centers.

They are available with the OCP Certified Quanta STRATOS S215-X1M2Z server and are expected to be available through other partners, as well as qualified QLogic Signature Partners, in April 2014.

“We see an increasing number of customers with FC infrastructure who want to adopt Open Compute hardware. The partnership with QLogic allows us to provide secure, reliable FC solutions that reduce energy consumption and maximize data center efficiency with Open Compute. Quanta QCT already delivers the industry’s best TCO for cloud service providers and enterprises adopting Open Compute, so this partnership is an ideal fit,” said Mike Yang, GM, Quanta QCT.

The OCP is creating a set of technologies that are disaggregated and open, allowing for innovation in the data center. It aims to facilitate the development of network hardware and software – together with project validation and testing – in an open and collaborative community environment. The company a FC adapter vendor to pass validation and testing to deliver a OCP-compliant adapter.

“Investment banking, securities and financial service organizations are requiring scalable, high bandwidth, and low latency connectivity options for storage in OCP operations,” said Stu Miniman, principal research contributor, Wikibon. “As they evaluate OCP solutions, users looking for guaranteed and predictable latency from a proven data center network infrastructure now have the option of FC for delivering performance and reliability for critical workloads.“

“OCP’s genesis was in cloud-oriented mega data centers, but OCP servers are now finding their way into the enterprise where FC is the storage interconnect of choice,” said Vikram Karvat, VP marketing, QLogic. “QLogic is the undisputed market share leader in FC adapters, and now with our OCP-compliant adapter, we are enabling IT organizations to confidently deploy OCP-based servers with an enterprise storage networking solution.“