Today Cavium Inc. announced the release of new I/O adapters for both server and storage connectivity for Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) ProLiant and Apollo Gen9 servers. The new adaptors are based off of Cavium's QLogic Fibre Channel and Ethernet technology. The new adaptors, HPE FlexFabric 10Gb 4-port 536FLR-T Adapter and the HPE StoreFabric SN1600Q 32GFC HBA, are designed to reduce costs and accelerate applications for enterprise, telecommunications, and the Cloud.
Today Cavium Inc. announced the release of new I/O adapters for both server and storage connectivity for Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) ProLiant and Apollo Gen9 servers. The new adaptors are based off of Cavium's QLogic Fibre Channel and Ethernet technology. The new adaptors, HPE FlexFabric 10Gb 4-port 536FLR-T Adapter and the HPE StoreFabric SN1600Q 32GFC HBA, are designed to reduce costs and accelerate applications for enterprise, telecommunications, and the Cloud.
The first adaptor designed for HPE ProLiant and Apollo Gen9 servers is the HPE FlexFabric 10Gb 4-port 536FLR-T Adapter. It is the first 4-port 10GbE offering for Apollo and ProLiant servers. In order to help reduce costs, the adaptor is built using HPE's Flexible LOM form factor with 10GBASE-T connections. Instead of using 10GbE SFP+ optic, customers can use Cat6a cables and RJ-45 connections. A further benefit is that the new adaptor uses standard Ethernet NIC connectivity and is backward compatible with 1GbE for HPE servers.
Key Ethernet Technologies and Features:
- HPE FlexFabric 10Gb 4-port 536FLR-T Adapter provides 4-port 10GBASE-T connectivity which is automatically backward compatible with 1GbE networks.
- Supports both iSCSI and FCoE storage offloads that conserve server CPU resources giving applications headroom and increasing virtual machine density.
- Advanced Server Virtualization features that include Single Root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) for low latency high performance virtual workloads.
- Acceleration for Networking Virtualization with Stateless Offloads for tunneling protocols including NVGRE, VXLAN and GRE.
The new host bus adaptor, the HPE StoreFabric SN1600Q 32GFC, is also a first, this time being the first Gen 6 32GFC offering in the HPE portfolio. Based on QLogic’s 2700 series adaptor, the new HBA claims a database performance increase of 50-80% more IOPS (at common database block sizes when compared to Gen 5 16GFC offerings) and provides customers with twice the bandwidth.
Key Fibre Channel Features and Benefits:
- The HPE StoreFabric SN1600Q 32GFC HBA is available in both single and dual-port offerings and is shipped by HPE with SFP+ optics included.
- QLogic StorFusion technology and integration with Brocade Gen 5 and Gen 6 Fibre Channel switches and directors simplify SAN deployment and improve uptime.
- Built-in support for HPE Smart SAN for HPE 3PAR within these adapters provides fully automated SAN fabric orchestration and management directly from HPE 3PAR StoreServ flash arrays, saving hours of manual effort and reducing risk due to human error or network changes.
- HPE has qualified this adapter to work in select Microsoft Windows Server and Linux environments and has a strong roadmap of upcoming operating system qualifications.
- Integration with HPE management utilities like iLO and System Upgrade Manager (SUM) as well as by QLogic QConvergeConsole software utility and VMware plugin.
Availability
Though the new adapters were first announced by HPE back in September, they are now available.
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