INDUSTRY
QLogic Extends Industry Lead in FCoE Market with Multiple Tier One OEM Design Wins for World's First Single Chip CNA
“While some vendors talk visions and announce their hopes and dreams, QLogic is busy taking the FCoE market by storm,” said Tom Trainer, president of storage research consultancy Analytico, Inc. “QLogic is at least 12 months ahead of the competition in the FCoE space and Analytico predicts that the company will continue to accelerate its established lead.”
The data center is evolving and converging—where higher speed networking is enabling communications between all IT resources, including compute, storage, clients, voice, LAN and internal and external clouds. As the data center is becoming a virtual set of networked resources and intelligent converged fabrics, QLogic’s FCoE solutions are at the center of this convergence, allowing data center managers to combine the lossless features of Fibre Channel with the ubiquitous connectivity of Ethernet. According to Gartner Research vice president, Roger Cox, FCoE will become one of the important technologies associated with cost containment and modernization initiatives for IT infrastructures over the coming years.
“With today’s announcement, QLogic achieved what no other vendor to date has been able to do in the FCoE space,” said Deni Connor, principal analyst, Storage Strategies NOW, a leading storage research consultancy. “ ‘Show me the silicon’ captures the essence of what QLogic delivered today, a new integrated single chip ASIC optimized for virtualized, converged data center environments utilizing bandwidth-intensive SSDs. QLogic is clearly at the forefront of making FCoE a tangible reality.”
“We’ve been successfully collaborating with tier one OEMs on integrating QLogic’s latest FCoE solutions into their servers and storage systems for the past six months and have now established a significant time-to-market advantage,” said Amit Vashi, vice president of marketing, QLogic Host Solutions Group. “In this challenging macroeconomic environment, customers are looking for savings across a multitude of dimensions—in power, space, cooling and management—and are eager to repurpose and redeploy existing infrastructure wherever possible. The Network Plus Architecture introduces a whole new era of cost savings to the data center. Mark this day—this is new technology and represents the starting point of 21st century data centers.”
According to Dell’Oro Group, FCoE adapter shipments are expected to more than double each year for the next five years. “We forecast that FCoE adapter shipments will grow from less than two thousand ports in 2008 to approach two million ports in 2013,” said Seamus Crehan, vice president at Dell’Oro Group.
Introducing the Network Plus Architecture
Exhibiting the highest degrees of volumetric efficiency in the industry, the world’s first fully integrated CNA-on-a-chip is based on the QLogic Network Plus Architecture, incorporating memory, processors and SerDes—with no external components required—and is specifically designed for space and power-constrained environments such as blade servers and high-density storage systems. The Network Plus Architecture represents the very latest in ASIC design technology and manufacturing and shares many commonalities with the world’s largest installed base of Fibre Channel adapters—over six million QLogic Fibre Channel HBA ports globally—including common storage APIs and management tools.
The new QLogic ASIC based on the Network Plus Architecture handles storage and data networking traffic at full 10GbE line speeds, consumes only one third the power of existing CNA chip sets and generates far less heat—eliminating the need for a heat sink. Leveraging the established architecture of the market-leading QLogic 2500 Series Fibre Channel adapters, it’s also the first single-chip CNA with an integrated, full FCoE offload engine, enabling faster application performance while saving precious CPU resources, which translates to higher degrees of server virtualization in the data center.
“QLogic’s Network Plus Architecture is a core enabling technology which brings separate network infrastructures together into a single, converged, Enhanced Ethernet network. To CIOs, this means lower cost connectivity, centralized network management and more flexible provisioning of data center resources through a single pipe, all at 10GbE speeds,” said Dave Vellante, president and co-founder of Wikibon, the world’s first Web 2.0 technology research and advisory community.
“Not only will this enable IT organizations to deploy next-generation technology, it should also give QLogic a significant go-to-market jump on its competitors with regards to design wins and provide an opportunity to educate and train IT end-users on the value of convergence,” said Bob Laliberte, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Converging the network will help companies transition away from the legacy silo’d technology domains and move towards a unified IT staff focused on delivering higher levels of service to the business.”
Introducing the QLogic 8100 Series Converged Network Adapters
Based on the advanced Network Plus Architecture, the QLogic 8100 Series is a family of PCI-Express CNAs designed for next-generation, virtualized and unified data centers with powerful multi-processor, multi-core servers. Available in multiple form factors, including standard and mezzanine cards, the adapters offer full certification for nearly every OS, including Windows Server, Linux, AIX and HP-UX, and virtualization platforms, such as VMware ESX Server, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer, as well as any hardware platform from PowerPC to Nehalem. The QLogic 8100 Series CNAs are optimized for both data and storage networking virtualization with superior 10GbEE performance to handle massive quantities of virtual machines.
Commenting on today’s announcement, Tony Asaro, founder and senior consultant for the INI Group, said, “The ability to use a single card that supports SAN, LAN, backup networks and management networks is powerful and can save customers a ton of money and headaches. I believe that this is an important milestone in networking that is in my view long overdue.”