QLogic has unveiled a new portfolio of Enhanced Gen 5 (16Gb) Fibre Channel Adapters as well as the industry’s first Gen 6 (32Gb) Fibre Channel Ready platform. The new platforms are designed 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. Additionally, the new Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters provide a combination of performance, reliability, power efficiency and investment protection and advanced set of data center diagnostic, orchestration and Quality of Service functionalities. Previously, QLogic announced 16Gb Fibre Channel support for the EMC VNX Series and Violin AFA in April of this year.
QLogic has unveiled a new portfolio of Enhanced Gen 5 (16Gb) Fibre Channel Adapters as well as the industry’s first Gen 6 (32Gb) Fibre Channel Ready platform. The new platforms are designed 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. Additionally, the new Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters provide a combination of performance, reliability, power efficiency and investment protection and advanced set of data center diagnostic, orchestration and Quality of Service functionalities. Previously, QLogic announced 16Gb Fibre Channel support for the EMC VNX Series and Violin AFA in April of this year.
New features and functionalities include:
- Future Proof Upgrades from 16Gb to 32Gb Fibre Channel: The QLE2694U is Gen 6 Fibre Channel Ready, which can upgrade from 16Gb to 32Gb Fibre Channel by merely changing the optics. This allows for long-term infrastructure investment protection for growing businesses.
- Performance and Scalability: The QLE2694, QLE2694U and QLE2694L are hitting the market as the first native quad-port Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters, quoted to boast over 2.6 million IOPS with optimal load balancing and linear performance scalability per port. With QLogic’s unique port-isolation design, the Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters offer independent data paths for each port, which have the ability to run a full line rate with over 12,000MB per second across PCIe 3.0 x16 lanes. As a result, the QLE2694 series provided the scalability needed in order to double the number of virtual machines (VMs) per system.
- StorFusion Technology for Advanced SAN Fabric Management and Performance: Also announced is QLogic StorFusion technology full suite of diagnostics, rapid provisioning, and guaranteed performance service-level agreements (SLAs) throughout the fabric leveraging Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel fabrics. These new adapters can automate and simplify SAN deployment and orchestration with its software-defined dynamic fabric provisioning and centrally assigned Fibre Channel node assignments within StorFusion. Both features are extremely important in software-defined data centers.
- Operational Efficiency: The QLogic indicates that there QLE2694 Series Adapters are also specced with a massive improvement in power efficiency . For example, they offer up to 75 percent lower in power per port when compared to previous Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters. This helps to significantly reduce the total cost of ownership as well as optimize power and lower thermal footprints in the data center by taking advantage of StarPower technology’s dynamic and adaptive power management features.
- Data Center Orchestration for Single or Multi-Tenant Environments: QLogic Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters are also integrated with major data center orchestration platforms, such as with VMware vCenter and Windows Server with Hyper-V. In addition, its support for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes and Windows Server 2012 Virtual Fibre Channel (vFC) technology enables a more simplified live VM migration.
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
- QLE2694L – a quad-port, low-profile Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapter
Availability
The new QLogic Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters with StorFusion technology are slated to ship sometime this month.
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