QLogic FlexSuite Adapters Certified With Cisco MDS Storage Switches

QLogic Corporation announced that the new
Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director is certified for use with its FlexSuite
adapters.

The combination of FlexSuite adapters and MDS switches provides
flexible, high performance building blocks for next-generation SANs.

The MDS portfolio offers flexible, multi-protocol solutions for FC,
FICON, FC over IP (FCIP), iSCSI, and converged networking with FCoE. Dual-personality 2600 and 8300 Series FlexSuite adapters with I/OFlex
technology function as 4/8/16Gb FC adapters or as 10GbE CNAs. Combined with the latest Cisco offerings, FlexSuite solutions provide customers flexibility and
investment protection with multi-protocol choices that future-proof SAN server
and storage connectivity.

The 16Gb FC MDS 9710 Multilayer Director delivers 24TBs per second of
total switching capacity. FlexSuite 2600 Series adapters provide three
times the performance and double the throughput of previous-generation
products. Together, these QLogic and Cisco solutions shorten backup and restore
windows, and provide connectivity for moving large data sets across the network.

The MDS 9710 Multilayer Director is a storage director with N+1
fabric, redundant components and a fault-tolerant architectural design.
QLogic’s HA architecture provides port-level isolation, adding an additional
layer of reliability, scalability and security with each port having its own
set of processor, memory and firmware resources. The combination of
FlexSuite adapters and the MDS 9710 Multilayer Director provides non-stop
operations with predictable scalability.

"Cisco and QLogic continue to
deliver the performance and architectural flexibility that enable data centers
to be more agile, cost-effective and reliable," said Amit Vashi VP
marketing, host solutions group, QLogic. "Our solutions reduce complexity and deliver new levels of flexibility
to meet the enterprise LAN and SAN connectivity demands of today’s servers and
storage, as well as provide a future-proof solution for the service-oriented,
cloud-enabled data centers of tomorrow."

"Cisco’s MDS solutions and QLogic’s
FC and FCoE adapters unify customer storage architectures for easy
manageability and operations," said Rajeev Bhardwaj, VP, Cisco data center
group. "Cisco is pleased to
work with QLogic to offer an open adapter environment, in which customers can
select best-of-breed interfaces that best support their infrastructure,
with the assurance of certification and interoperability."

The FlexSuite product portfolio interoperates with Cisco Data Center
Unified Fabric solutions to address new customer requirements for SANs by
delivering a single platform for both FC and FCoE. The continued growth of
data, fueled by virtualization, cloud computing and the adoption of flash and
SSD technology, will require high-bandwidth, zero-downtime, multi-protocol
storage networking solutions. The MDS 9710 Multilayer Director addresses
these concerns with the reliability, performance, availability and
scalability needed by mission-critical applications such as
Oracle, SAP and SQL. QLogic and Cisco address future data growth requirements
and preserve current IT knowledge with multi-protocol technology and flexibility.