Cavium QLogic Delivers Expanded Options for HPE Server and Storage Connectivity

Cavium, Inc. announced that Hewlett Packard Enterprise L.P. (HPE) has recently launched I/O adapters providing server and storage connectivity to HPE ProLiant and Apollo Gen9 servers based on its QLogic FC and Ethernet technology.

FlexFabric 10Gb 4-port 536FLR-T

Available, the HPE FlexFabric 10Gb 4-port 536FLR-T Adapter and the StoreFabric SN1600Q 32GFC HBA enable enterprise, telco and cloud applications to be accelerated while reducing deployment cost.

FastLinQ Quad Port 10GBASE-T adapter for HPE
The HPE FlexFabric 10Gb 4-port 536FLR-T adapter is an four-port 10GbE offering available for the ProLiant and Apollo Gen9 servers and is designed in HPE’s Flexible LOM form factor with 10GBASE-T connections that utilize low cost

Cat6a cables and RJ-45 connections. Eliminating the need for expensive 10GbE SFP+ optic greatly reduces the deployment costs for HPE customers. The FlexFabric 10Gb four-port 536FLR-T adapter provides standard Ethernet NIC connectivity and is backward compatible with 1GbE for HPE servers.

“Cavium is a leading provider for I/O connectivity for a broad range of HPE servers,” said Raghib Hussain, COO, Cavium. “The introduction of QLogic FastLinQ 4-port 10GBASE-T technology brings low cost Ethernet connectivity, while the Gen 6 FC 32GFC adapter delivers a high performance and reliable storage interconnect for world class HPE server infrastructure. This is an important milestone in enabling Enterprise datacenters and service providers to increase operational efficiency and application performance enabling an agile IT infrastructure.“

“As customers modernize their data centers by deploying a hybrid infrastructure, they are looking for versatile solutions. The HPE FlexFabric 10Gb 4-port 536FLR-T Adapter provides an affordable upgrade path from 1GBASE-T to 10GBASE-T to accelerate our customers’ networking dependent applications from the datacenter to the cloud,” said Tom Lattin, VP, server options, HPE.

Key Ethernet technologies and features

FlexFabric 10GbE four-port 536FLR-T Adapter provides four-port 10GBASE-T connectivity which is automatically backward compatible with 1GbE networks.
Supports both iSCSI and FCoE storage offloads that conserve server CPU resources giving applications headroom and increasing VM density.
Advanced Server Virtualization features that include Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) for low latency high performance virtual workloads.
Acceleration for networking virtualization with stateless offloads for tunneling protocols including NVGRE, VXLAN and GRE.

StoreFabric SN1600Q 32Gb host bus

QLogic Gen 6 FC for HPE
The StoreFabric SN1600Q 32GFC HBA is a Gen 6 32Gb FC offering in the HPE portfolio. This adapter based on QLogic 2700 series adapter technology provides HPE customers with twice the bandwidth and improves database performance with 50-80% ^[1] more IO/s at common database block sizes when compared to Gen 5 16Gb FC offerings.

Key FC features and benefits

The StoreFabric SN1600Q 32GFC HBA is available in both single and dual-port offerings and is shipped by HPE with SFP+ optics included.
QLogic StorFusion technology and integration with Brocade Gen 5 and Gen 6 FC switches and directors simplify SAN deployment and improve uptime.
Built-in support for HPE Smart SAN for 3PAR within these adapters provides fully automated SAN fabric orchestration and management directly from 3PAR StoreServ flash arrays, saving hours of manual effort and reducing risk due to human error or network changes.
HPE has qualified this adapter to work in select Windows Server and Linux environments and has a roadmap of upcoming OS qualifications.

Integration with HPE management utilities like iLO and System Upgrade Manager (SUM) as well as by QLogic QConvergeConsole software utility and VMware, Inc.‘ plug-in available for download at the company website.

All these adapters were announced by HPE on September 26^th, 2016, and begin shipping in volume.

^[1] source