New Family of Adapters Deliver Business Value with Improved Performance for Enterprise Applications, Increased Infrastructure Resiliency and More Efficient SAN Administration

ALISO VIEJO, Calif., March 01, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, QLogic began production shipments of the industry’s first Gen 6 (32Gb) Fibre Channel Adapters. The new QLogic 2700 Series Adapters enable greater virtualization density and improved database performance, combined with increased operational efficiency. QLogic Gen 6 Fibre Channel Adapters, which OEMs have been testing since October 2014, not only deliver enhanced performance, but also provide unsurpassed reliability and resiliency.

“Fibre Channel is an inherently secure and reliable data network,” said Vikram Karvat, vice president of products, marketing and planning, QLogic. “The new QLogic Gen 6 Fibre Channel Adapters build on this foundation, delivering unsurpassed value by enabling enterprise applications to meet peak demand, minimizing downtime, and further simplifying Storage Area Network (SAN) administration. Additionally, as we look forward, the industry is defining Gen 7 Fibre Channel, providing continued investment protection to enterprise data centers for many years to come.”

The new QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 Fibre Channel Adapters accelerate enterprise applications, deliver a highly resilient infrastructure and optimize IT staff productivity.

• Accelerating Enterprise Applications
  • The new QLogic Gen 6 Fibre Channel Adapters deliver up to an 80 percent increase in I/O operations per second (IOPS) for typical database block sizes, reducing query times for large databases, and enabling more rapid business decision making when compared to Gen 5 (16Gb) Fibre Channel.¹
  • Delivering up to 2.6 million IOPS and 24,000MB per second of throughput, the new QLogic Gen 6 Fibre Channel Adapters are ideally suited for environments utilizing next-generation flash-based storage. With a fully offloaded protocol stack, these adapters operate with the lowest CPU utilization of any block storage technology in the industry.
• Delivering a Highly Resilient Infrastructure
  • QLogic StorFusion™ technology provides forward error correction (FEC), which automatically corrects transmission errors and improves network resiliency.
  • Unique port isolation technology allows linear performance scaling across ports and increased reliability under adverse conditions.
  • Gen 6 Fibre Channel performance reduces backup windows allowing organizations to more effectively meet recovery time objectives.
• Optimizing IT Staff Productivity
  • The new QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 Fibre Channel Adapters deliver a suite of accelerated deployment and diagnostic features for improved SAN manageability, and end-to-end quality of service (QoS) for enhanced performance and improved service-level agreements (SLAs).
  • Leveraging software-defined, fabric-assigned port worldwide name (FA-WWN) and boot from SAN configurations, QLogic StorFusion technology can improve server deployment and replacement by up to 75 percent.²
  • Full backward compatibility with two previous generations of Fibre Channel from a software, tools and infrastructure perspective reduces the complexity of deploying, administering and managing the SAN, while supporting an incremental upgrade strategy.
    
    

The new QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 Fibre Channel Adapters are available immediately, in single, dual and quad-port options. Additionally, the QLogic 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters, which were announced in October of 2015, have been augmented with new single and dual-port options.

Join us for a complimentary webcast on March 24, 2016 at 9 a.m. PT to learn more. Register here: http://bit.ly/1TLvLZR.

Supporting Quotes

“The introduction of the new Brocade G620 switch with Gen 6 Fabric Vision technology and QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 Fibre Channel Adapters provides our mutual customers with breakthrough and unmatched reliability that they have come to expect from their mission-critical application infrastructure,” said Jack Rondoni, vice president of storage networking, Brocade. “Our partnership with QLogic will continue to enable ongoing storage innovation and investment protection for next generation storage architectures.”

“The introduction of the next generation in Fibre Channel speeds and features will continue to propel the Fibre Channel market forward,” said Seamus Crehan, president, Crehan Research. “QLogic’s timing in bringing Gen 6 Fibre Channel products to market should help its long-time leadership position in the industry, as it enables customers to build safe, dependable, software-defined storage networks at even greater speeds.”

“The SAN market is evolving due to emerging storage solutions like all-flash arrays and software-defined storage,” said Sameh Boujelbene, director, Controller & Adapter and Server Market Research, Dell’Oro. “Next generation Fibre Channel products are needed in order to address these trends with increased performance, resiliency and operational efficiency.”

“The storage landscape is trending toward a flash-centric world. Our VNX all-flash and hybrid storage arrays, powered by QLogic Gen 5 Fibre Channel technology, give EMC customers an infrastructure that can consolidate multiple workloads and handle unpredictable IT environments,” said Pierluca Chiodelli, senior director, Product Management and Customer Operations, EMC Corporation. “The combination of QLogic’s next generation 2700 Series Adapters and our unified VNX platform will offer customers a flexible solution that delivers industry-leading innovation and enterprise capabilities.”

“As legacy SANs become increasingly more complex, customers are seeking out solutions that address current and future requirements,” said Marty Lans, senior director, Storage Interoperability and Connectivity Engineering, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). “QLogic and HPE have a longstanding partnership designed around intelligent integration, such as with our Smart SAN and Express Writes Technology. The transition to Gen 6 Fibre Channel technology will be important as we continue to develop our HPE 3PAR StoreServ all-flash array portfolio and HPE StoreOnce data protection solutions, which require more bandwidth and higher IOPS.”

"QLogic's new Gen 6 Fibre Channel 2700 Series Adapters improve the connection bandwidth and I/O throughput between servers and Fibre Channel storage, delivering higher performance and enabling more efficient and stable storage connection solutions for mission-critical server systems,” said Mr. Qiu Long, general manager, Server Domain, Huawei.

“The storage networking market is ready to make the transition to 32Gb Fibre Channel driven by SSD bandwidth and latency requirements, having recently completed the transition to 16Gb Fibre Channel,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., research director, Data Center, Cloud and SDN, IHS. “QLogic with the 2700 Series is well positioned to participate in this market transition.”

“As a customer-centric IT provider, Lenovo looks to our technology partners to help us deliver comprehensive and value add products,” said Kamran Amini, executive director, Enterprise Business Group, Lenovo. “QLogic is a strong partner for us with innovative products, like its Gen 6 Fibre Channel technology. These products will provide our customers with long-term, scalable solutions for the fast growing converged and hyper-converged markets in the U.S. and abroad.”

“NetApp All Flash Arrays are increasingly connected to fast, reliable SAN solutions as enterprises race to deliver actionable business results," said Lee Caswell, vice president, Product, Solutions and Services Marketing at NetApp. “We look forward to building on our partnership with QLogic to help customers further realize the benefits of flash performance for high-performance workloads.”

"Leveraging next generation Fibre Channel connectivity from QLogic provides maximum performance and throughput for applications running on FlashArray//m," said Matt Kixmoeller, vice president of products, Pure Storage. "Partnering with QLogic helps us continue to deliver unprecedented speed, scale and simplicity to our customers with all-flash."

“We worked closely with QLogic to develop our new VirutaLUN 7.4 storage emulation software which supports 32Gb Fibre Channel speeds, as well as other key unique features that provide a cost effective, scalable and easily deployable solution for storage networking development and testing,” said Vince Asbridge, director of software engineering, SANBlaze. “As an early adopter of 32Gb Fibre Channel, it was important for us to partner with the industry leader, QLogic. Our relationship with QLogic has proved invaluable and we’re looking forward to seeing what comes next.”

“The explosive growth and increasing value of data is driving the need for flash-based storage in the enterprise,” said Sudhir Prasad, senior director, Product Management, Violin Memory. “QLogic’s new 2700 Series Adapters will not only support these workloads now, but also scale with future demand, effectively simplifying SAN management and providing ultimate performance and resiliency.”

“Virtualization has redefined data center infrastructure and led to hyper-convergence,” said Howard Hall, senior director, Global Technology Partners Organization, VMware. “Enterprise-class storage solutions are important components of these hyper-converged infrastructures and require reliable, high-performance storage connectivity solutions such as QLogic’s new 2700 Series Gen 6 Fibre Channel Adapters for their business-critical applications.”