QLogic StorFusion Technology Designed in Collaboration With Brocade

Qlogic Corp. announced StorFusion, a suite of features available with the Enhanced Gen 5 (16Gb) FC adapters, also announced.

StorFusion, which leverages the Brocade Fabric Vision technology, is designed to streamline provisioning, add resiliency and improve management visibility, addressing the needs of IT organizations that require increased reliability, integrated management and guaranteed network performance. Together, QLogic and Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. are delivering a suite of diagnostics, rapid provisioning, and guaranteed performance SLAs throughout the fabric.

The combined solution provides:

• Improved TCO and reliability – The diagnostics and monitoring suite combines company’s Enhanced Gen 5 FC Adapters with Brocade Gen 5 FC switches to enable:

  • Improved link diagnostics – Support for Brocade ClearLink (D_Port) allows IT administrators to quickly run automated connectivity diagnostic tests in a single step. This feature rapidly identifies optics or cable problems, reducing fabric deployment time and helping to ensure reliable connections.

  • Faster troubleshooting of failing components – Saving additional time and resources, the Read Diagnostic Parameters (RDP) feature obtains statistics remotely, accessing diagnostic information from anywhere in the fabric, easily identifying the source of network and media errors.

  • Simplified cable identification and management – Link Cable Beacon (LCB) technology enables light-emitting diode (LED) beaconing for ports on both ends of a physical link, simplifying cable identification and management with visual indication, particularly in large storage environments.

  • Improved resiliency and performance – Forward Error Correction (FEC) improves performance and link integrity, supporting higher end-to-end data rates by automatically detecting and correcting link errors.

  • Enhanced configuration management and performance – FC Ping (FC Ping), FC Trace Route (FC Trace Route) and Fabric Device Management Interface (FDMI) streamline configuration and management, while improving performance.

• Rapid deployment and orchestration – Automating and simplifying SAN deployment and management tasks by using software-defined dynamic fabric provisioning via fabric assigned port worldwide name (FA-WWN) and fabric-based boot LUN discovery (F-BLD), StorFusion allows IT administrators to pre-provision SAN fabrics, eliminating the repetitive manual process and ensuring that new servers boot directly to the OS. These features allow the data center to scale without compromising SLAs and can reduce the number of steps required to deploy servers by up to 30%, saving organizations a significant amount of time and effort, up to 75% in large server deployments ESG, QLogic 2600 Series 16Gb Gen 5 FC Adapter with Brocade Fabric, August 2015. ⁽¹⁾
  

• Performance SLA enforcement in multi-tenant and virtualized data centers – StorFusion allows multiple virtual ports to share a single physical port, while maintaining minimum performance per virtual port and its related VM all the way through the fabric using a frame based prioritization mechanism End-to-end SLA QoS requires all components in the SAN fabric to support CS_CTL based QoS. ⁽²⁾
  

“Mission-critical, private cloud and flash-accelerated workloads demand the utmost in performance, QoS and infrastructure reliability,” said Vikram Karvat, VP, products, marketing and planning, QLogic. “The new QLogic StorFusion suite allows IT administrations to increase operational simplicity, understand their connectivity, even in complex virtual environments, and address network errors before they impact business operations.“

“Our collaboration with QLogic is changing the FC industry landscape and solving customer challenges around the deployment of servers, storage, and networking,” said Jack Rondoni, VP, storage networking, Brocade. “The integration of Brocade and QLogic technology extends Fabric Vision features end-to-end to accelerate server deployments, maximize application performance, and improve infrastructure reliability. Our mutual customers will benefit from increased infrastructure efficiency, reduced OpEx and simplified management.“

Enhanced Gen 5 FC adapters with StorFusion technology will begin shipping this month.

⁽¹⁾  ESG, QLogic 2600 Series 16Gb Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapter with Brocade Fabric, August 2015
⁽²⁾  End-to-end SLA QoS requires all components in the SAN fabric to support CS_CTL based QoS