Open Standards-Based QoS and Virtual Fabrics Capabilities for QLogic Adapter Products

QLogic Corp. announced that QLogic adapters allow end-users to realize the benefits of Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities in standards-based Virtual Fabric environments. Virtual Fabrics provide storage administrators with an industry-standard method for improving storage area network (SAN) security, scalability and performance by segmenting physical SANs into multiple virtual SANs. QoS enables QLogic customers to allocate bandwidth or priority to traffic through the virtualized adapter to address the specific needs of an application. QLogic’s QoS capability now enables IT administrators to tie Virtual Machines (VM) to virtualized fabric environments such as Cisco VSANs using NPIV technology, which has been enabled in QLogic adapters since 2006.

"Cisco recently announced Virtual Machine-aware SANs, where individual Virtual Machines can take advantage of advanced SAN Services such as QoS and security," said Rajeev Bhardwaj, senior director of Product Management, Data Center and Switching Technology Group at Cisco. "QLogic’s NPIV support for VSANs now bridges the last gap in storage networking virtualization. Together, our joint capabilities bring VSAN benefits such as traffic isolation, Quality of Service, security, role-based management, and detailed performance monitoring to the Virtual Machine level, delivering end-to-end virtualization of storage networks, from the VM through Cisco MDS 9000 switches to the storage devices themselves."

"Unlike proprietary competitive approaches, QLogic is offering an open standards-based, QoS capability for virtualized network environments," said Amit Vashi, vice president of marketing, QLogic Host Solutions Group. "With the largest installed base of adapters, QLogic provides its customers the benefits of end-to-end virtualization by leveraging enhanced capabilities, such as QoS and Virtual Fabrics."

QLogic is demonstrating this functionality at Storage Networking World in Dallas, Texas in Booth #409. QLogic adapters with QoS and Virtual Fabric functionality are available today to key customers.