Fibre Channel HBAs

No one wants to be the first to adopt new software or a new technology. "Let someone else find the bugs," we say. Sometimes, though, a bleeding-edge technology is too tempting to ignore. That's how we felt about the new crop of 2-Gb Fibre Channel HBAs (host bus adapters), which promise to double the speed of Fibre Channel connections. So we set out to test HBAs from Adaptec, Atto Technology, Emulex Corp. and QLogic Corp. at our Green Bay, Wis., Real-World Labs®. Considering the morass of Fibre Channel standards documents and the sketchy nature of vendor interoperability, we expected some rough going, and we weren't disappointed. In the end, this lack of interoperability forced us to look at Emulex's HBA individually (see "Emulex Earns Extra Credits"). Among the three cards left in our comparative review, QLogic's QLA2300F took our Editor's Choice award thanks to its ease of setup, error-free operation and superior performance numbers. In the end, we were glad we'd stuck with our tests, despite the pain. But next time we may just let someone else take the hits first. ... Nah.