Company Launches Industry's First CNAs With the Ability to
Run Multiple Protocols Concurrently
ALISO VIEJO, Calif., Oct. 7, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Marking the
beginning of a new era of flexible data center technologies, QLogic
Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC) today announced a new, third-generation 10GbE
converged networking portfolio--code named "3GCNA"--with a number of
technology breakthroughs. Based on the third generation of QLogic's
market-leading, battle-hardened Network Plus(TM) Architecture, the
portfolio features a trio of new products including 8200 Series 10GbE
converged network adapters, 3200 Series 10GbE intelligent Ethernet
adapters and a converged LAN-on-motherboard (cLOM) solution.
These products feature a number of industry firsts for the converged
networking market, including the ability to:
-- Run offloaded Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI and IP
(Ethernet) traffic concurrently
-- Perform switch-agnostic, virtual machine (VM)-to-VM communication within
physical machines
-- Deploy quad 1GbE and dual 10GbE ports from a single chip, using advanced
FlexLOM(TM) technology
The 3GCNA portfolio is the first instantiation of QLogic's Adaptive
Convergence(TM) strategy. This strategy builds on the success of the
company's recent flex ports introduction and introduces four key,
flexible, business-enabling I/O interconnect capabilities:
-- ConvergeFlex(TM): Concurrent Protocol Processing Services
-- VMflex(TM): Advanced Virtualization Services
-- FlexOffload(TM): Multiple Protocol Offload Services
-- SecureFlex(TM): Data Security Services
The new products are designed to address the increasingly complex
requirements of virtualized data centers, cloud service providers and
the converged enterprise. All of these environments require 10GbE
line-rate throughput for virtualized data and storage traffic, support
for concurrent IP, FCoE and iSCSI, and low CPU utilization to allow for
extreme mobility of VMs. The QLogic 3GCNA portfolio addresses these
requirements with products that are protocol- and OS-agnostic and
support exabyte-level scalability.
"The IT business is rapidly shifting toward a services-based
environment where capacity is virtual, flexible and acquired on demand.
This increases pressures on IT infrastructure management to be more
efficient, agile and available for thousands of internal and millions
or billions of external users," said Dave Vellante, president,
Wikibon.org. "Third generation CNAs from QLogic provide the vital
interconnect technology that enables its OEMs and channel partners to
deliver the flexible data center connectivity layer for next
generation, service-based applications."
"Now customers can shift workloads from an iSCSI SAN to an FCoE SAN
without rebooting servers or waiting for an outage window," said John
Webster, senior analyst and partner, Evaluator Group. "This represents
a level of network convergence above and beyond anything else in the
marketplace today."
"QLogic's flex ports technology for converged network switches enabled
customers to shift protocol support on-the-fly, making
protocol-agnostic data mobility a reality," said Bob Laliberte, senior
analyst, ESG. "Today's announcement marks the introduction of QLogic's
third generation CNA, which incorporates similar capabilities at the
host level, running IP, FCoE or iSCSI protocols at the same time.
Shifting protocol support on-the-fly will be important to those
organizations needing to dynamically support a multitude of different
workloads without disruption. Service providers and large enterprises
should especially benefit from this adaptive design that enables them
to deploy variable connectivity options in a dynamic way across the
data center."
The new 3GCNA portfolio offers the lowest CPU utilization in the
industry, freeing up server cycles for business-critical applications
and the increased mobility of VMs. The portfolio is fully interoperable
with all existing LAN, NAS and SAN environments and supports nearly
every hypervisor, operating system and boot environment. The entire
portfolio is managed by the new QConvergeConsole(TM), which provides
multi-platform, single-pane-of-glass management of FCoE, iSCSI and IP
functions for ease-of-administration and converged network deployment.
Available in a number of form factors, the 3GCNA 10GbE converged
networking portfolio is slated for general availability this calendar
quarter.
"Today's announcement is the result of all of QLogic's combined
knowledge, technologies and experience in the data center," said Amit
Vashi, vice president, marketing, Host Solutions Group, QLogic. "We
continue to invest in the core technologies required to enable Adaptive
Convergence for customers who are faced with multiple speeds,
protocols, form factors and operating environments, and we are
constantly striving to achieve a higher degree of data center
efficiency. With the 3GCNA portfolio, customers can now achieve extreme
efficiencies in their data and storage networking environments that
were previously unattainable."
Unrivaled Tier One OEM Support
Dell
"The benefits of standardizing on a single, unified Ethernet fabric are
obvious to a broad range of businesses and organizations," said Brian
Payne, director, server platform management at Dell. "Dell continues to
work closely with QLogic to provide our mutual customers--such as cloud
service providers and enterprises building fully virtualized, converged
environments--with innovative, industry-standard solutions that enable
administrators to increase efficiencies with enhanced 10GbE
performance."
EMC
"We believe that 10Gb Ethernet will play a key role as the backbone of
private clouds," said Josh Kahn, vice president, solutions and
technical marketing at EMC Corp. "Converged networking for storage
applications is an area of focus for both EMC and QLogic and together
we have a long history of collaboration and are working to deliver the
latest generation of high performance storage network solutions to our
customers."
HP
"Clients continue to place a high priority on simplified, integrated
and automated solutions in their data centers," said Jim Ganthier, vice
president, marketing, metrics and solutions, Industry Standard Servers
and Software, HP. "As HP continues to lead the industry with its
Converged Infrastructure strategy, we are addressing these solutions
requirements with key partners in convergence such as QLogic to help
reduce complexity and costs and deliver quantifiable business results."
IBM
"IBM is at the front of the technology curve in 10GbE converged
networking technology due in large part to key partners like QLogic,"
said Alex Yost, vice president and business line executive, IBM
BladeCenter. "IBM was the first tier-one system vendor to integrate
QLogic's market-leading single chip 8100 Series adapters for native
FCoE connectivity in our server portfolio. Building on the established
capabilities of the 8100 Series, QLogic's third-generation 10GbE NICs,
LOMs and CNAs feature a number of highly compelling industry
breakthroughs including the first CNAs with the ability to run multiple
protocols including FCoE, iSCSI and Ethernet concurrently, which is
highly complementary to our efforts at IBM to simplify and consolidate
the data center."
VMware
"VMware vSphere(TM) is designed to deliver IT as a service through
hybrid cloud architecture," said Sachi Sambandan, senior director,
ecosystem engineering, VMware. "By using VMware vSphere with QLogic's
virtualization-ready technologies such as VMflex, we believe customers
will be able to realize the efficiency and agility benefits that result
from running multiple protocols concurrently on a single card."
Follow QLogic @ twitter.com/qlogic
About QLogic
QLogic (Nasdaq:QLGC) is a global leader and technology innovator in
high performance networking, including adapters, switches and ASICs.
Leading OEMs and channel partners worldwide rely on QLogic products for
their data, storage and server networking solutions. QLogic is a NASDAQ
Global Select company and is included in the S&P 500. For more
information, visit www.qlogic.com.