QLogic Offloaded, Multiprotocol Adapters With PCIe 3.0

QLogic Corp. announced that
its FlexSuite
adapters are the first to provide offloaded, multiprotocol
support with PCIe 3.0 for the Intel Corp.‘s Xeon Processor
E5-2600/1600 v2 product family.

The adapters and the Xeon Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 product
family complement each other with mutual support for PCIe 3.0. It
provides twice the bandwidth of PCIe 2.0, allowing the company’s 16Gb
Gen 5 FC and 10Gbe converged network adapters to fulfill the storage
I/O demands of data centres driven by increasing virtualisation
density, cloud environments and flash cache solutions in servers,
arrays and appliances.

The dual personality-Gen 5 FC and 10GbE converged network-adapters
offer features for servers based on the Xeon Processor
E5-2600/1600 v2 product family. The 2600 Series Gen 5 FC adapters and
8300 series feature port-level isolation architecture. It adds an
additional layer of reliability and security, ensuring that if one
port should encounter issues, the second, isolated port will continue
to function without interruption. Adapters are architected with two
independent channels, so that I/O imbalances, error recovery or
firmware updates on one port do not impact the other port. This
enables the adapter to offer deterministically predictive and
scalable port performance and increased reliability.

The 8300 series support
simultaneous, multiprotocol (TCP, FCoE or iSCSI) traffic for servers
based on the Xeon Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 product family and
the PCIe 3.0 bus architecture. It is also an offloaded,
multiprotocol adapter to support SR-IOV with PCIe 3.0. SR-IOV allows
for multiple guest OSs to simultaneously share access of an I/O
device without having to rely on assistance from the software
hypervisor, enabling scalability for multitenant environments.

"The Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 Product Family
moves enterprises, cloud service providers, technical computing
centres and other organizations toward operational excellence,"
said Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing, Intel. "Combined with solutions optimized for this
new platform, such as QLogic FlexSuite adapters with PCIe 3.0
support, the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 Product Family
allows organizations to deploy secure, private clouds with platform
and data protection, and efficiently handle big data workloads."

"Intel has enabled the next generation of I/O performance
in virtualised environments with the Intel Xeon Processor
E5-2600/1600 v2 Product Family and its ability to fully exploit PCIe
3.0, while eliminating a number of I/O bottlenecks," said
Amit Vashi, VP of products, technology and planning, QLogic. "QLogic
FlexSuite dual personality adapters are engineered to fully
capitalize on this new Intel platform in FC and 10Gb Ethernet
environments by balancing the computational ability of the Intel Xeon
Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 Product Family with superior I/O
scalability, yielding exceptional application performance."

The dual-personality adapters provide performance in application
workload environments. The HA ASIC architecture with port-level
isolation across its dual-port architecture allows for scaling beyond
the company’s nearest rival’s shared architecture approach. Each port
on the adapter is able to achieve full line-rate performance,
independent of the activity of the other port. It scales as I/Os
increase, while the competitor’s adapter experiences a decrease in
throughput due to its less scalable architecture.