QLogic Expands Storage Connectivity Portfolio 

ALISO VIEJO, Calif., Oct. 12 -- 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

About QLogic

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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Source: QLogic