“While some vendors talk visions and announce their hopes and dreams, QLogic is busy taking the FCoE market by storm,” stated Tom Trainer, president of storage research consultancy Analytico, Inc. “QLogic is at least 12 months ahead of the competition in the FCoE space and Analytico predicts that the company will continue to accelerate its established lead.”

The data center is evolving and converging, where the higher speed networking is allowing communications between all IT resources, incorporating compute, storage, clients, voice, LAN and internal and external clouds. As the data center is becoming a virtual set of the networked resources and intelligent converged fabrics, company’s Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) solutions are at the center of this convergence, enabling data center managers to integrate the lossless features of Fibre Channel with the ubiquitous connectivity of Ethernet. According to the Gartner Research vice president, Roger Cox, FCoE will become one of the important technologies related with cost containment and modernization initiatives for the IT infrastructures over the coming years.

“With today’s announcement, QLogic achieved what no other vendor to date has been able to do in the FCoE space,” stated Deni Connor, principal analyst, Storage Strategies NOW. “ ‘Show me the silicon’ captures the essence of what QLogic delivered today, a new integrated single chip ASIC optimized for virtualized, converged data center environments utilizing bandwidth-intensive SSDs. QLogic is clearly at the forefront of making FCoE a tangible reality.”

“We’ve been successfully collaborating with tier one OEMs on integrating QLogic’s latest FCoE solutions into their servers and storage systems for the past six months and have now established a significant time-to-market advantage,” stated Amit Vashi, vice president of marketing, QLogic Host Solutions Group. “In this challenging macroeconomic environment, customers are looking for savings across a multitude of dimensions—in power, space, cooling and management—and are eager to repurpose and redeploy existing infrastructure wherever possible. The Network Plus Architecture introduces a whole new era of cost savings to the data center. Mark this day—this is new technology and represents the starting point of 21st century data centers.”

According to Dell’Oro Group, the FCoE adapter shipments are anticipated to more than double each year for the next five years. “We forecast that FCoE adapter shipments will grow from less than two thousand ports in 2008 to approach two million ports in 2013,” stated Seamus Crehan, vice president at Dell’Oro Group.

Introducing the Network Plus Architecture:

Exhibiting the high degrees of volumetric efficiency, the fully integrated CNA-on-a-chip is based on QLogic Network Plus Architecture, including memory, processors and SerDes with no external components needed, and is particularly designed for space and power-constrained environments like blade servers and high-density storage systems. The Network Plus Architecture symbolizes the new ASIC design technology and manufacturing and shares many commonalities with the installed base of Fibre Channel adapters over six million QLogic Fibre Channel HBA ports globally incorporating common storage APIs and management tools.

The new QLogic ASIC based on Network Plus Architecture handles the storage and data networking traffic at full 10GbE line speeds, consumes only one third the power of existing CNA chip sets and produces far less heat, abolishing the need for a heat sink. Leveraging the established architecture of the QLogic 2500 Series Fibre Channel adapters, it’s also the first single-chip CNA with an integrated, full FCoE offload engine, allowing faster application performance while saving valuable CPU resources, that translates to higher degrees of server virtualization in the data center.

“QLogic’s Network Plus Architecture is a core enabling technology which brings separate network infrastructures together into a single, converged, Enhanced Ethernet network. To CIOs, this means lower cost connectivity, centralized network management and more flexible provisioning of data center resources through a single pipe, all at 10GbE speeds,” stated Dave Vellante, president and co-founder of Wikibon.

“Not only will this enable IT organizations to deploy next-generation technology, it should also give QLogic a significant go-to-market jump on its competitors with regards to design wins and provide an opportunity to educate and train IT end-users on the value of convergence,” stated Bob Laliberte, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Converging the network will help companies transition away from the legacy silo’d technology domains and move towards a unified IT staff focused on delivering higher levels of service to the business.”

Introducing the QLogic 8100 Series Converged Network Adapters:

The new QLogic 8100 Series is based on the advanced Network Plus Architecture. The new QLogic 8100 Series is a family of PCI-Express CNAs that are designed for new virtualized and unified data centers with powerful multi-processor, multi-core servers. Available in multiple form factors, incorporating standard and mezzanine cards, the adapters provide full certification for nearly every OS, incorporating Windows Server, Linux, AIX and HP-UX, and virtualization platforms, like VMware ESX Server, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer, and also any hardware platform from PowerPC to Nehalem. The new QLogic 8100 Series CNAs are optimized for both data and storage networking virtualization with advance 10GbEE performance to handle the massive quantities of virtual machines.

Tony Asaro, founder and senior consultant for the INI Group, stated, “The ability to use a single card that supports SAN, LAN, backup networks and management networks is powerful and can save customers a ton of money and headaches. I believe that this is an important milestone in networking that is in my view long overdue.”

Unparalleled Industry Support:

Cisco:

“Cisco and QLogic continue our commitment to unifying data and storage networks through FCoE,” stated Soni Jiandani, vice president, Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit, Cisco. “The new QLogic single-chip CNA is another breakthrough for this technology that will further extend the benefits of converged networks, an important value proposition of our Nexus 5000 Series switches and our recently announced Unified Computing System.”

Dell Inc. (Dell):

“Along with QLogic, Dell is further enabling the Unified Fabric to address our customers’ most significant pain points. With the introduction of this new ASIC, we will be able to jointly deliver enhanced performance and reduced power consumption for our customers who need 10GbE performance and desire to converge their Fibre Channel SANs into a common, unified, Ethernet fabric. These capabilities make this an ideal solution for blade server and virtualization environments,” stated Larry Hart, worldwide senior manager, Storage & Networking, Dell.

EMC:

“EMC believes that converged networks are an important part of helping to make data centers more efficient,” stated Barbara Robidoux, vice president, Storage Marketing, EMC. “EMC’s leadership in testing, integrating and offering FCoE technologies to customers is the result of collaboration with key partners like QLogic. As this important market segment continues to emerge, we are continuing to work with QLogic and support their FCoE converged network adapter initiatives.”