QLogic Announces First Big Win for its 8 Gbps FC Mezz Card

QLogic’s first announced win with HP for its 8 Gbps Fibre Channel Mezzanine card was a big one yesterday in that HP reports that its blade server revenue market share for Q4 08 was 54.8%.   That provides QLogic a good headstart in providing a solution for HP customers who can now can now purchase QLogic’s 8 Gbps FC Mezzanine adapter for HP’s BladeSystem
c-Class servers, a key component of HP’s converged infrastructure platform for data centers known as Matrix.


According to HP’s website, the cards specify 200,000 initiator IOPS per port and are available April 27---although no pricing was available on the website as of Friday, April 24.  HP’s website identifies 5 major areas in which the new 8 Gbps FC adapter is optimized:  virtualization, power, security, RAS (Reliability, Availability, and Security), and Management.  The card was custom designed for HP and supports N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV),  which allows multiple logical connections to share the same physical port and utilizes QLogic’s dynamic power management StarPower technology to provide the maximum PCI Express bandwidth at the lowest power consumption.  QLogic’s specifications sheet for the QMH2562 identifies the power usage as 5.7 watts, which is a little more than 1 watt less than  Emulex’s announced 8 Gbps Fibre Channel Mezzanine adapter for Dell’s M1000e.  However, when checking with Dell to see when its 8 Gbps card would be available and at what price, I was not able to speak with anyone to confirm either.  

Security is optimized in the new adapter through Fibre Channel Security Protocol; data integrity is provided through T10 CRC (a 16-bit cyclic redundancy check), and access control in virtualized environments.  In addition, RAS is optimized with the implementation of Overlapping Protection Domains (OPD) on both control and data planes, which ensures that data is never unprotected.  Finally, backward compatibility with earlier 2- and 4 Gbps adapters, common drivers for common operating systems, and firmware embedded in the driver provide investment protection and simplified management for administrators.