QLogic With Enhanced 16Gb and 32Gb FC Adapters

Qlogic Corp. introduced a portfolio of Enhanced Gen 5 (16Gb) FC adapters and an Gen 6 (32Gb) FC ready platform to address the demands of next generation workloads, low latency SSD/flash-based storage and caching, and memory-intensive and transaction-heavy applications including virtualization, online transaction processing (OLTP), data migration and 4K video production.

QLE2694U adapter

This enhanced Gen 5 FC Adapters provide more than just a performance increase; they deliver reliability, power efficiency and investment protection, along with advanced set of data center diagnostic, orchestration and QoS capabilities.

This class of I/O connectivity solutions deliver:

• Future proof upgrades from 16Gb to 32Gb FC – The QLE2694U is Gen 6 FC Ready, with upgradeability from 16Gb to 32Gb FC by simply changing the optics, ensuring long-term infrastructure investment protection.

QLE2694 and QLE2694L adapters

• Performance and scalability – The QLE2694, QLE2694U and QLE2694L are the first native quad-port Gen 5 FC adapters, delivering more than 2.6 million IO/s with optimal load balancing and linear performance scalability per port. Leveraging company’s unique port-isolation design, the Enhanced Gen 5 FC Adapters provide independent data paths for each port, running full line rate with more than 12,000MB/s across PCIe 3.0 x16 lanes. By providing double the performance per adapter, and almost two times the IO/s of previous Gen 5 FC adapters, the QLE2694 series delivers the scalability to double the number of VMs per system.

• StorFusion technology for SAN fabric management and performance – StorFusion technology, announced, delivers a full suite of diagnostics, rapid provisioning, and guaranteed performance SLAs throughout the fabric leveraging Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. Gen 5 FC fabrics. These adapters automate and simplify SAN deployment and orchestration by using software-defined dynamic fabric provisioning and centrally assigned FC node assignments within StorFusion which are vital in software-defined data centers.

•  Operational efficiency – The QLE2694 Series aAdapters provide up to 75% lower power per port compared to previous Gen 5 FC Adapters for reduced TCO and leverage StarPower technology with dynamic and adaptive power management features to optimize power and lower thermal footprints in the data center.

• Data center orchestration for single or multi-tenant environments – Enhanced Gen 5 FC adapters are integrated with major data center orchestration platforms including VMware vCenter and Windows Server with Hyper-V. Support for vSphere Virtual Volumes, which enables per-VM storage management through the use of policies, and Windows Server 2012 Virtual FC (vFC) technology, allows for simplified live VM migration. In addition, the company’s QConvergeConsole (QCC) plug-in for VMware vCenter Server and vSphere Web Client provides a graphical topology map of the virtualized infrastructure simplifying complex management tasks.

“Our Enhanced Gen 5 FC and Gen 6 FC Ready Adapters provide game-changing data center orchestration, virtualization and performance capabilities that specifically address the needs of the fastest growing segments of the SAN market such as all flash arrays, and multi-tenant environments,” said Vikram Karvat, VP, products, marketing and planning, QLogic. “FC is the most trusted network for storage, servers and applications. Even in the world’s largest cloud companies, the front end may run on Ethernet, but the back end, where mission-critical operations reside, run on FC. FC is the ‘Swiss Banking’ of network protocols and it will be the trusted fabric for many years to come.“

QLE2694 series of adapters include:

• QLE2694U – a quad-port, full-height Enhanced Gen 5 (16Gb) FC Adapter that is upgradable to Gen 6 (32Gb) FC

• QLE2694 – a quad-port, full-height Enhanced Gen 5 FC Adapter, and

• QLE2694L – a quad-port, low-profile Enhanced Gen 5 FC Adapter

The Enhanced Gen 5 FC adapters with StorFusion technology will begin shipping this month.

“FC has been the foundational and transformational networking technology in the data center that has enabled mission critical, high performance storage,” said Jack Rondoni, VP, storage networking, Brocade Communication Systems, Inc. “Technology innovation has been a key differentiator that has kept FC relevant and important through the many evolutions of data center technology. QLogic’s Gen 6 FC Ready HBAs represent the next leap in innovation that will help customers make a seamless transition to higher reliability and 32Gbps performance.“

“Given that 16Gb FC HBA shipments are rapidly heading toward a majority of the total FC HBA market, QLogic’s announcement of enhanced 16Gb FC HBAs, in conjunction with 32Gb-capable FC HBAs, covers the current and future requirements of modern data centers,” said Seamus Crehan, president, Crehan Research, Inc. “These products will help enable cloud best practices such as elastic infrastructure, virtualization, scalable storage and orchestration in a reliable, cost-effective and power-efficient manner.“

“QLogic provides DDN customers with the highest performance pathway to FC networking,” said Bret Weber, CTO and VP, engineering, DataDirect Networks, Inc. “DDN is the leading provider to data intensive global enterprises and our customers demand the highest performance and absolute fastest connectivity. When it comes to providing the industry leading FC solutions, DDN relies on Qlogic.“

“The FC market will experience stable customer demand out to 2019 due to new flash (SSD) storage use cases requiring low-latency high capacity bandwidth, and continued investment of the vendor community to develop higher speed interfaces and capabilities needed in the modern on or off premises data center,” said Clifford Grossner, Ph.D., research director, data center, cloud and software-defined networking, IHS. “QLogic’s Enhanced Gen 5 FC (Gen 6 Ready) products provide the performance, application traffic flow monitoring, virtualization support, and investment protection needed to be a strong marketplace contender.“

“Pure Storage and QLogic have partnered to bring the 16Gb FC connectivity options in the recently introduced FlashArray //m product line. The FlashArray //m is a tier 1 enterprise all flash storage array (AFA) that delivers blazing performance and throughput at consistent sub-millisecond latency,” said Matt Kixmoeller, VP products, Pure Storage, Inc. “QLogic’s Gen 5 HBAs provide a no-compromise high-performance solution for applications that demand the highest performance levels offered by the FlashArray //m storage array.”

“Large enterprises rely on flash storage for their growing transaction intensive applications,” said Sudhir Prasad, senior director, product management and strategy, Violin Memory, Inc. “QLogic’s FC portfolio supports these workloads with unmatched performance and efficiency, allowing our customers to simplify SAN management and get the most out of their flash-based storage infrastructure.“

“QLogic and VMware share the vision of simplified storage operations and increased application SLA visibility,” said Howard Hall, senior director, global technology partner organization, Vmware, Inc. “The support of QLogic for vSphere Virtual Volumes adds to our partner momentum on unique solutions for Software-Defined Storage.”