ALISO VIEJO, Calif., Oct. 12, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, QLogic® introduced a new portfolio of Enhanced Gen 5 (16Gb) Fibre Channel Adapters and the industry’s first Gen 6 (32Gb) Fibre Channel 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. The new Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters provide more than just a performance increase; they deliver unsurpassed reliability, power efficiency and investment protection, along with the most advanced set of data center diagnostic, orchestration and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities available today. This new class of I/O connectivity solutions deliver:
- Future Proof Upgrades from 16Gb to 32Gb Fibre Channel – The QLE2694U is Gen 6 Fibre Channel Ready, with upgradeability from 16Gb to 32Gb Fibre Channel by simply changing the optics, ensuring long-term infrastructure investment protection.
- Unsurpassed Performance and Scalability – The QLE2694, QLE2694U and QLE2694L are the industry’s first native quad-port Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters, delivering more than 2.6 million IOPS with optimal load balancing and linear performance scalability per port. Leveraging QLogic’s unique port-isolation design, the Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters provide independent data paths for each port, running full line rate with more than 12,000MB per second across PCIe 3.0 x16 lanes. By providing double the performance per adapter, and almost two times the IOPS of previous Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters, the QLE2694 series delivers the scalability to double the number of virtual machines (VMs) per system.
- StorFusion™ Technology for Advanced SAN Fabric Management and Performance – QLogic StorFusion technology, also announced today, delivers a full suite of diagnostics, rapid provisioning, and guaranteed performance service-level agreements (SLAs) throughout the fabric leveraging Brocade® Gen 5 Fibre Channel fabrics. These adapters automate and simplify SAN deployment and orchestration by using software-defined dynamic fabric provisioning and centrally assigned Fibre Channel node assignments within StorFusion which are vital in software-defined data centers.
- Unmatched Operational Efficiency – The QLogic QLE2694 Series Adapters provide up to 75 percent lower power per port compared to previous Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters for reduced total cost of ownership (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 – QLogic Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters are integrated with major data center orchestration platforms including VMware vCenter™ and Windows Server with Hyper-V. Support for VMware vSphere® Virtual Volumes™, which enables per-VM storage management through the use of policies, and Windows Server 2012 Virtual Fibre Channel (vFC) technology, allows for simplified live VM migration. In addition, the QLogic 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 Fibre Channel and Gen 6 Fibre Channel 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, vice president of products, marketing, and planning, QLogic. “Fibre Channel 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 Fibre Channel. Fibre Channel is the ‘Swiss Banking’ of network protocols and it will be the trusted fabric for many years to come.”
The QLE2694 Series of Adapters include:
- QLE2694U – a quad-port, full-height Enhanced Gen 5 (16Gb) Fibre Channel Adapter that is upgradable to Gen 6 (32Gb) Fibre Channel
- QLE2694 – a quad-port, full-height Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapter, and
- QLE2694L – a quad-port, low-profile Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapter
The new QLogic Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters with StorFusion technology will begin shipping this month. Join us for a complimentary webinar on Nov. 5, 2015 to learn more about optimizing your fabric with Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel. Register here: http://qlogic.com/Pages/formsReg/EnhancedGen5.aspx.
Supporting Quotes
“Fibre Channel has been the foundational and transformational networking technology in the data center that has enabled mission critical, high performance storage,” said Jack Rondoni, vice president of storage networking, Brocade. “Technology innovation has been a key differentiator that has kept Fibre Channel relevant and important through the many evolutions of data center technology. QLogic’s Gen 6 Fibre Channel 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 Fibre Channel HBA shipments are rapidly heading toward a majority of the total Fibre Channel HBA market, QLogic’s announcement of enhanced 16Gb Fibre Channel HBAs, in conjunction with 32Gb-capable Fibre Channel HBAs, covers the current and future requirements of modern data centers," said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. "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 Fibre Channel networking,” said Bret Weber, chief technology officer and vice president of engineering, DDN. “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 Fibre Channel solutions, DDN relies on QLogic.”
“The Fibre Channel 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 of data center, cloud and software-defined networking at IHS. “QLogic’s Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel (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 Fibre Channel connectivity options in the recently introduced FlashArray //m product line. The FlashArray //m is a Tier 1 enterprise class all flash storage array (AFA) that delivers blazing performance and throughput at consistent sub-millisecond latency,” said Matt Kixmoeller, vice president of products at Pure Storage. “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. “QLogic’s Fibre Channel 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. “The support of QLogic for vSphere Virtual Volumes adds to our partner momentum on unique solutions for Software-Defined Storage.”
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QLogic – the Ultimate in Performance
QLogic (Nasdaq:QLGC) is a global leader and technology innovator in high performance server and storage networking connectivity products. Leading OEMs and channel partners worldwide rely on QLogic for their server and storage networking solutions. For more information, visit www.qlogic.com.
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