SCIENCE

QLogic has announced a new, third-generation 10GbE converged networking portfolio -- code named "3GCNA" -- with a number of technology breakthroughs. Based on the third generation of QLogic's market-leading, battle-hardened Network Plus Architecture, the portfolio features a trio of new products including 8200 Series 10GbE converged network adapters, 3200 Series 10GbE intelligent Ethernet adapters and a converged LAN-on-motherboard (cLOM) solution.

These products feature a number of industry firsts for the converged networking market, including the ability to:

• Run offloaded Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI and IP (Ethernet) traffic concurrently.
• Perform switch-agnostic, virtual machine (VM)-to-VM communication within physical machines.
• Deploy quad 1GbE and dual 10GbE ports from a single chip, using advanced FlexLOMTM technology.

The 3GCNA portfolio is the first instantiation of QLogic's Adaptive Convergence strategy. This strategy builds on the success of the company's recent flex ports introduction and introduces four key, flexible, business-enabling I/O interconnect capabilities:

• ConvergeFlex: Concurrent Protocol Processing Services.
• VMflex: Advanced Virtualization Services.
• FlexOffload: Multiple Protocol Offload Services.
• SecureFlex: Data Security Services.

The new products are designed to address the increasingly complex requirements of virtualized datacenters, cloud service providers and the converged enterprise. All of these environments require 10GbE line-rate throughput for virtualized data and storage traffic, support for concurrent IP, FCoE and iSCSI, and low CPU utilization to allow for extreme mobility of VMs. The QLogic 3GCNA portfolio addresses these requirements with products that are protocol- and OS-agnostic and support exabyte-level scalability.

"The IT business is rapidly shifting toward a services-based environment where capacity is virtual, flexible and acquired on demand. This increases pressures on IT infrastructure management to be more efficient, agile and available for thousands of internal and millions or billions of external users," said Dave Vellante, president, Wikibon.org. "Third generation CNAs from QLogic provide the vital interconnect technology that enables its OEMs and channel partners to deliver the flexible datacenter connectivity layer for next generation, service-based applications."

"Now customers can shift workloads from an iSCSI SAN to an FCoE SAN without rebooting servers or waiting for an outage window," said John Webster, senior analyst and partner, Evaluator Group. "This represents a level of network convergence above and beyond anything else in the marketplace today."

"QLogic's flex ports technology for converged network switches enabled customers to shift protocol support on-the-fly, making protocol-agnostic data mobility a reality," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, ESG. "Today's announcement marks the introduction of QLogic's third generation CNA, which incorporates similar capabilities at the host level, running IP, FCoE or iSCSI protocols at the same time. Shifting protocol support on-the-fly will be important to those organizations needing to dynamically support a multitude of different workloads without disruption. Service providers and large enterprises should especially benefit from this adaptive design that enables them to deploy variable connectivity options in a dynamic way across the datacenter."

The new 3GCNA portfolio offers the lowest CPU utilization in the industry, freeing up server cycles for business-critical applications and the increased mobility of VMs. The portfolio is fully interoperable with all existing LAN, NAS and SAN environments and supports nearly every hypervisor, operating system and boot environment. The entire portfolio is managed by the new QConvergeConsole, which provides multi-platform, single-pane-of-glass management of FCoE, iSCSI and IP functions for ease-of-administration and converged network deployment. Available in a number of form factors, the 3GCNA 10GbE converged networking portfolio is slated for general availability this calendar quarter.

"Today's announcement is the result of all of QLogic's combined knowledge, technologies and experience in the datacenter," said Amit Vashi, vice president, marketing, Host Solutions Group, QLogic. "We continue to invest in the core technologies required to enable Adaptive Convergence for customers who are faced with multiple speeds, protocols, form factors and operating environments, and we are constantly striving to achieve a higher degree of datacenter efficiency. With the 3GCNA portfolio, customers can now achieve extreme efficiencies in their data and storage networking environments that were previously unattainable."

Unrivaled Tier One OEM Support

Dell

"The benefits of standardizing on a single, unified Ethernet fabric are obvious to a broad range of businesses and organizations," said Brian Payne, director, server platform management at Dell. "Dell continues to work closely with QLogic to provide our mutual customers -- such as cloud service providers and enterprises building fully virtualized, converged environments -- with innovative, industry-standard solutions that enable administrators to increase efficiencies with enhanced 10GbE performance."

EMC

"We believe that 10Gb Ethernet will play a key role as the backbone of private clouds," said Josh Kahn, vice president, solutions and technical marketing at EMC Corp. "Converged networking for storage applications is an area of focus for both EMC and QLogic and together we have a long history of collaboration and are working to deliver the latest generation of high performance storage network solutions to our customers."

HP

"Clients continue to place a high priority on simplified, integrated and automated solutions in their datacenters," said Jim Ganthier, vice president, marketing, metrics and solutions, Industry Standard Servers and Software, HP. "As HP continues to lead the industry with its Converged Infrastructure strategy, we are addressing these solutions requirements with key partners in convergence such as QLogic to help reduce complexity and costs and deliver quantifiable business results."

IBM

"IBM is at the front of the technology curve in 10GbE converged networking technology due in large part to key partners like QLogic," said Alex Yost, vice president and business line executive, IBM BladeCenter. "IBM was the first tier-one system vendor to integrate QLogic's market-leading single chip 8100 Series adapters for native FCoE connectivity in our server portfolio. Building on the established capabilities of the 8100 Series, QLogic's third-generation 10GbE NICs, LOMs and CNAs feature a number of highly compelling industry breakthroughs including the first CNAs with the ability to run multiple protocols including FCoE, iSCSI and Ethernet concurrently, which is highly complementary to our efforts at IBM to simplify and consolidate the datacenter."

VMware

"VMware vSphere is designed to deliver IT as a service through hybrid cloud architecture," said Sachi Sambandan, senior director, ecosystem engineering, VMware. "By using VMware vSphere with QLogic's virtualization-ready technologies such as VMflex, we believe customers will be able to realize the efficiency and agility benefits that result from running multiple protocols concurrently on a single card."