QLogic Launches FCoE CNA on a Chip

ALISO VIEJO, Calif. -- Further extending its industry lead in the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) market, QLogic Corp. (NASDAQ:QLGC), the leading supplier of high performance network infrastructure solutions, today announced the immediate availability of the all-new QLogic 8100 Series of PCI-Express converged network adapters (CNAs), based on the companys advanced new Network Plus Architecture. QLogic’s first-to-market advantage with intelligent converged fabric technology has enabled the company to secure a significant number of server and storage OEM design wins.

“While some vendors talk visions and announce their hopes and dreams, QLogic is busy taking the FCoE market by storm,” said 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 higher speed networking is enabling communications between all IT resources, including compute, storage, clients, voice, LAN and internal and external clouds. As the data center is becoming a virtual set of networked resources and intelligent converged fabrics, QLogic’s FCoE solutions are at the center of this convergence, allowing data center managers to combine the lossless features of Fibre Channel with the ubiquitous connectivity of Ethernet. According to Gartner Research vice president, Roger Cox, FCoE will become one of the important technologies associated with cost containment and modernization initiatives for 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,” said Deni Connor, principal analyst, Storage Strategies NOW, a leading storage research consultancy. “ ‘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,” said 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.”QLogic Corp.