QLogic Joins OpenPOWER Foundation

QLogic Corp. has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community based on the POWER microprocessor architecture.

QLogic joins a growing roster of technology organisations working collaboratively to build advanced server, networking, storage and acceleration technology to enable those responsible for data centres to rethink their approach to technology.

The foundation aims at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centres. The group makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time, as well as making POWER IP licensable to others, expanding the ecosystem of the platform.

“QLogic is looking forward to working with OpenPOWER member organisations to deliver our unique brand of innovation to the market. Today’s demand for cloud-based services, along with the growing popularity of connected, mobile devices, require data centre architectures to deliver incredible scalability, flexibility and performance,” said Vikram Karvat, VP marketing, QLogic. “As a market leader in FC and Ethernet adapters and the industry’s front-runner in innovative data centre I/O solutions, QLogic will enhance functionality for highly virtualised, open standards-based, cloud and web-scale data centres based on the IBM POWER platform.“

The OpenPOWER Foundation aims to drive expansion of enterprise, data centre hardware and software, giving the industry greater ability to innovate across the POWER platform. The OpenPOWER ecosystem enables customers to build systems finely tuned to the POWER architecture.

“The development model of the OpenPOWER Foundation is one based on collaboration and represents a new way of innovating around processor technology for big data and cloud,” said Brad McCredie, president, OpenPOWER Foundation. “With QLogic joining this initiative, we have expanded our base of technology providers, as they bring a wealth of high performance networking and storage expertise, technology and innovation ability to OpenPOWER, allowing us to capitalise on emerging workloads.“

QLogic Gen 5 FC Adapters: security, reliability and scalability
Gen 5 FC adapters are designed to tackle high bandwidth, I/O-intensive applications, such as virtualisation, streaming media, online transaction processing, big data analytics and data warehousing where reliability is critical. The underlying driver stack in QLogic Gen 5 FC technology is proven in more than 15 million ports shipped to enterprise data centres around the world.

The QLogic dual-port ASIC is designed with the company’s multi-port traffic isolation feature for greater reliability and security on dual-port models. This architecture, with complete on-chip CPU and memory isolation across both ports of the adapter, ensures that if one port should encounter issues, the second, isolated port will continue to function securely and without interruption. With two independent channels, I/O imbalances, error recovery or firmware updates on one port do not impact the second port. This enables the adapter to offer secure, predictive and scalable port performance and increased reliability. This is essential for enterprise data centres assuring high levels of availability for mission-critical applications.

thernet Adapter Solutions: Performance with flexibility
By delivering Ethernet with low CPU utilisation, QLogic adapters excel in virtualized environments. Featuring multiple protocol offload and concurrent LAN (TCP/IP) and SAN (FCoE, iSCSI) protocol processing over a shared Ethernet link, QLogic adapters offer maximum flexibility. Ultra-low CPU utilization frees up server cycles for business-critical applications and the increased mobility of VMs. QLogic QConvergeConsole adds multi-platform, single-pane-of-glass management of FCoE, iSCSI and TCP/IP protocols for ease-of-administration and converged network deployment.