QLogic FlexSuite dual personality—Gen 5 Fibre Channel and 10GbE Converged Network¬—adapters offer a number of key features for servers based on the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 Product Family. QLogic FlexSuite 2600 Series Gen 5 Fibre Channel adapters and 8300 Series Converged Network Adapters feature QLogic’s unique port-level isolation architecture. Port-level isolation adds an additional layer of reliability and security, ensuring that if one port should encounter issues, the second, isolated port will continue to function securely and without interruption. FlexSuite adapters are architected with two independent channels, so that I/O imbalances, error recovery or firmware updates on one port do not impact the other port. This enables the adapter to offer secure, deterministically predictive and scalable port performance and increased reliability.
QLogic FlexSuite 8300 Series Converged Network Adapters are the first in the industry to support simultaneous, multiprotocol (TCP, FCoE or iSCSI) traffic for servers based on the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 Product Family and the PCIe 3.0 bus architecture. The 8300 Series is also the first fully offloaded, multiprotocol adapter to support SR-IOV with PCIe 3.0. SR-IOV allows for multiple guest operating systems to simultaneously share access of an I/O device without having to rely on assistance from the software hypervisor, enabling greater scalability for multitenant environments.
“The Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 Product Family moves enterprises, cloud service providers, technical computing centres and other organizations toward operational excellence,” said Jim Pappas, director of Initiative Marketing, Intel Corporation. “Combined with solutions optimized for this new platform, such as QLogic FlexSuite adapters with PCIe 3.0 support, the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 Product Family allows organizations to deploy secure, private clouds with platform and data protection, and efficiently handle big data workloads.”
“Intel has enabled the next generation of I/O performance in virtualised environments with the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 Product Family and its ability to fully exploit PCIe 3.0, while eliminating a number of I/O bottlenecks,” said Amit Vashi, vice president of products, technology and planning, QLogic. “QLogic FlexSuite dual personality adapters are engineered to fully capitalize on this new Intel platform in Fibre Channel and 10Gb Ethernet environments by balancing the computational ability of the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 Product Family with superior I/O scalability, yielding exceptional application performance.”
QLogic FlexSuite dual-personality adapters provide superior real-world performance in application workload environments. The QLogic FlexSuite high availability ASIC architecture with complete port-level isolation across its dual-port architecture allows for scaling beyond QLogic’s nearest rival’s shared architecture approach. Each port on the QLogic adapter is able to achieve full line-rate performance, independent of the activity of the other port. The QLogic adapter scales as outstanding I/Os increase, while the competitor’s adapter experiences a decrease in throughput due to its less scalable architecture.