QLogic and Brocade collaborate

The new QLogic suite of end-to-end features enables data centre managers to reduce operating expenses and total cost of ownership by accelerating deployment, increasing performance and simplifying management of Gen 5 Fibre Channel SANs featuring Brocade Fabric Vision technology and QLogic 2600 Series adapters.
“To meet the growing business demands created by advanced computing environments, enterprise IT is embracing highly virtualised and cloud-based architectures, which increase demands on Fibre Channel SAN fabrics,” said Tony Carrozza, senior vice president of worldwide sales, QLogic. “Our collaboration with Brocade offers greater value and enables a smooth transition to virtualised network storage. Organisations can leverage these advanced features to achieve maximum results from the industry’s most widely deployed Fibre Channel storage network infrastructures built on QLogic adapters and Brocade Fabric Vision technology.”

QLogic’s new end-to-end enhancements include Brocade ClearLink support, a key Brocade Fabric Vision technology that simplifies deployment and support for high performance fabrics. ClearLink allows storage administrators to run a battery of automated diagnostic tests to assess the health of links or identify issues prior to deployment. By proactively verifying the integrity of critical transceivers, organisations can save time and increase network availability by quickly addressing any physical layer issues without the need for special optical testers.

Another co-developed enhancement for QLogic adapters is QoS, which improves network performance and prevents network congestion by prioritising the use of bandwidth from the fabric to the host. With QoS, traffic is classified as it arrives at the switch, and then processed on the basis of configured priorities. Traffic can be dropped, prioritised for delivery or subjected to limited delivery options.

Available with QLogic’s next software release in November, QLogic’s new suite of end-to-end features are fully integrated with QLogic management tools, including the QConvergeConsole GUI, CLI and VMware vCenter plug-in.

“Over the past year QLogic and Brocade have worked closely to bring to market a compelling set of features that work seamlessly across QLogic adapters and Brocade switches,” said Jack Rondoni, vice president, storage networking, at Brocade. “These new features are designed to provide greater value by optimising SAN manageability and performance in highly scalable, virtualised data centers. We look forward to co-developing additional features for QLogic adapters that leverage Brocade Fabric Vision to further enhance the robustness of our mutual customers’ SAN infrastructures and to demonstrate why Fibre Channel will continue to be the technology of choice for the world’s most demanding workloads.”

Market Leaders in Fibre Channel Infrastructure Join Forces
QLogic is the vendor of choice among IT professionals looking for optimum performance, scalability and efficiency while tackling ever-growing enterprise workloads. QLogic award-winning 16Gb Gen 5 Fibre Channel adapters have been recognized by IT professionals as the Market Leader in Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) five consecutive years in IT Brand Pulse brand preference surveys, and Storage Magazine named QLogic FlexSuite Product of the Year for 2012. QLogic has held the market share leadership position in Fibre Channel adapters for more than 10 consecutive years with solutions designed to support the increased scalability and I/O capacity demands created by advanced computing environments.

Brocade leads the industry in providing comprehensive network solutions that help the world’s leading organizations transition smoothly to a virtualized world where applications and information reside anywhere. As a result, Brocade facilitates strategic business objectives such as consolidation, network convergence, virtualization, and cloud computing. Today, Brocade solutions are used in over 90 percent of Global 1000 data centres as well as in enterprise LANs and the largest service provider networks.