QLogic Delivers 16Gb FC Solution for Huawei Servers

QLogic Corp. announced that its FlexSuite 2600 Series 16Gb Gen 5 FC adapters are now shipping for Huawei Tecal RH Series rack servers and X Series data center servers.

QLogic’s continued collaboration with Huawei, an information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, demonstrates QLogic’s commitment to delivering the latest, performance connectivity solutions to growing IT markets in China and around the globe.

Available under the Huawei brand in single-port and dual-port models, the Gen 5 adapters double the performance of previous-generation FC storage networking solutions, allowing enterprises to improve price-performance, reduce power consumption-per-gigabit, conserve PCIe slots for other IT needs, and support more VMs per server. Backward-compatible with 8Gb and 4Gb FC storage networking solutions, Huawei Gen 5 FC adapters provide investment protection for existing SAN infrastructure.

“Huawei Tecal servers are widely implemented in mission-critical environments because they deliver high performance, reliability and efficiency, and we are seeing increased adoption by Internet service providers, government organizations and large enterprises,” said Jane Li, COO, Huawei Enterprise USA. “The dramatic performance increase we see with QLogic Gen 5 FC adapter technology allows Huawei to accelerate bandwidth-hungry enterprise applications, resulting in fewer cables, fewer switches and easier management.”

“Our latest collaboration with Huawei helps QLogic extend its longstanding leadership position in FC adapters and strengthen our growing presence in China,” said Vikram Karvat, VP marketing, QLogic. “QLogic Gen 5 FC adapter technology provides large OEM customers such as Huawei with a competitive advantage by delivering unique features, such as port-level isolation, which increase reliability and scalable performance in our dual-port adapters.”

Huawei Gen 5 FC adapters, powered by QLogic, are designed to tackle high bandwidth, I/O-intensive applications, such as virtualization, streaming media, online transaction processing, backup and recovery, and data warehousing where reliability is critical. The underlying driver stack in QLogic Gen 5 FC technology is proven in more than 14 million ports shipped to enterprise data centers around the world.

Gen 5 FC delivers reliability, security and data availability
The QLogic dual-port ASIC is designed with the company’s multi-port traffic isolation feature for 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, deterministically predictive and scalable port performance and increased reliability. This is essential for enterprise data centers-assuring high level of availability for mission-critical applications.

Performance and scalability
Gen 5 FC technology handles three times the transactions (1.2 million IO/s) and double the bi-directional throughput (6,000 MBps) compared to 8Gb FC, and is 40% faster than 10GbE, increasing application performance and reducing backup times in half. When Demartek LLC, an independent research firm, generated TPC-H [1] like database queries, the QLogic Gen 5 FC adapter completed the same analytical queries in 35% less time than the competitive offering [2].

For high throughput tier-1 applications and high-density virtualized environments, Gen 5 FC adapters deliver deterministically predictive and scalable performance across both ports compared to the competition. In side-by side tests [3], the QLogic Gen 5 adapter delivered 85% more transactions when scaling from single port to dual port, a better showing than the competition’s dual-port scalability.

Gen 5 FC is optimized for virtualized environments
Gen 5 FC technology provides a scalable architecture for higher density VM deployment per server while still providing offload capabilities with increased bandwidth allocation to each VM. Adapters further enhance VM mobility by increasing availability to meet peak-demand workloads. Gen 5 FC includes support for advanced features such as virtual FC (vFC) in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) on a per VM basis. NPIV allows users to create virtual ports and assign QoS to each virtual port. Business-critical applications can be assigned dedicated bandwidth or priority, allowing the end-user to better utilize I/O resources.

[1] The TPC BenchmarkH (TPC-H) was used to generate database queries only. No official TPC-H benchmark results were published, and these results are not comparable to published TPC results.

[2] Demartek QLogic 2600 Series FC HBA Evaluation, December 2012

[3] QLogic 2600 Series 16Gb Gen 5 FC HBAs Double Performance and Flexibility