… And QLogic 10GbE CNAs

QLogic Corp. announced that its 3200 Series 10GbE intelligent Ethernet adapters and 8200 Series 10GbE converged network adapters (CNAs) are now fully certified and available in HP ProLiant ML and DL rackmount and tower servers.

The QLogic 8200 Series CNA and the QLogic 3200 Series Ethernet adapter mark the beginning of flexible data center technologies. QLogic 3GCNA products are designed to address the complex requirements of virtualized data centers, cloud service providers and the converged enterprise. All of these environments require 10GbE line-rate throughput for virtualized data and storage traffic, support for concurrent protocols, and low CPU utilization to allow for mobility of virtual machines (VMs). The QLogic 3GCNA portfolio addresses these requirements with products that are protocol- and OS-agnostic and support exabyte-level scalability.

"As part of our Adaptive Convergence strategy, QLogic is providing flexible network resources across the enterprise that help convergence leaders deliver adaptable, autonomic and flexible IT environments," said Amit Vashi, vice president, marketing, Host Solutions Group, QLogic. "QLogic 10GbE technology addresses new data, storage and server networking solutions that are optimized for virtualized data centers, converged enterprises and cloud computing environments."

"Clients are looking for cost-effective data center network architectures that are both flexible and agile," said McLeod Glass, director of marketing, Industry Standard Servers, Enterprise Storage, Servers and Networking, HP. "To increase flexibility, HP ProLiant servers combined with QLogic’s 3GCNA automatically converge data and storage networks into one platform that addresses a variety of workloads while also providing variable connectivity options across the data center."

The QLogic 8200 Series CNA and the QLogic 3200 Series 10GbE adapter, available from HP as the HP StorageWorks CN1000Q Dual Port Converged Network Adapter and HP NC523SFP Dual Port 10GbE Server Adapter respectively, are designed, developed and delivered with the customer in mind. The first HP StorageWorks adapter to incorporate QLogic CNA technology, the QLogic 8200 Series provides interoperability and reduced acquisition, operational and power costs by consolidating Fibre Channel and Ethernet into a single Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) adapter. The latest QLogic 10GbE adapter to ship from HP, the QLogic 3200 Series supports 10GbE line-rate speeds with two ports active and attaches to the host server via a PCIe Gen2 x8 bus, eliminating any bottleneck on the host bus.

By delivering 10GbE performance with low CPU utilization, the QLogic 8200 Series excels in virtualized environments, utilizing QLogic’s  flexible networking technologies including:

• ConvergeFlex: concurrent protocol processing services including FCoE, NIC and iSCSI
• VMflex: advanced virtualization services
• FlexOffload: multiple protocol offload services

The QLogic 3200 Series provides multiple stateless offloads to reduce CPU burden and improve server performance. The 3200 Series supports a variety of external connection options including SFP+ direct-attach copper cables and optical SR, and is supported by HP Flex-10 and HP FlexFabric.

QLogic 3200 and 8200 10GbE adapters offer low CPU utilization, freeing up server cycles for business-critical applications and the increased mobility of VMs. QLogic 3GCNA adapters are interoperable with all existing LAN, NAS and SAN environments and support nearly every hypervisor, operating system and boot environment. The entire portfolio is managed by the new ConvergeConsole, which provides multi-platform, single-pane-of-glass management of FCoE and IP functions for ease-of-administration and converged network deployment.