This week, at Mobile World Congress, QLogic introduced the new QLogic FastLinQ 45000 series of Ethernet controllers, enabling 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100Gb Ethernet (100GbE)-based network connectivity on a single high-performance ASIC. The latest QLogic FastLinQ Ethernet-based technology is highly extensible and flexible, delivering a broad set of capabilities customized to address the needs of the telco, enterprise, managed service provider, cloud and storage markets.
"The QLogic FastLinQ 45000 series offers support for more protocols and features than any other technology available in the market today," said Jesse Lyles, vice president and general manager, Ethernet Products, QLogic. "We designed our latest Ethernet-based products to address the rapidly changing needs of the data center and the specific needs of mega data centers run by telecommunications providers, MSPs and enterprise private clouds."
These solutions provide IT administrators with support for an extremely expansive set of features and protocols, delivering the following key benefits:
Improved server utilization:
QLogic FastLinQ 45000 series solutions provide hardware offloaded protocol processing which results in a significant reduction of the CPU burden and improves overall server efficiency. Hardware-offloaded protocol support includes:
Broad multi-protocol Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) interoperability, with CPU offload for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), RDMA over Converged Ethernet v2 (RoCEv2) and internet wide area RDMA protocol (iWARP), delivering the first truly universal RDMA Network Interface Card (RNIC).
Hardened storage protocol interoperability, with CPU offload for iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER) and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) over Fabrics, provides a Converged Network Adapter (CNA) solution that supports not only traditional Storage Area Network (SAN) connectivity, but also newer scale-out storage solutions that are based on object and file.
Increased scalability for virtual servers and networks:
Advanced Network Interface Card (NIC) virtualization capabilities with support for Multi-queue, NIC Partitioning (NPAR) and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), enables faster performance in virtualized environments and tenant consolidation, which requires the use of fewer physical ports while maintaining quality of service (QoS) and service-level agreements (SLAs).
Support for Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) supports network function virtualization (NFV), which enables and accelerates virtual network function (VNF) applications and provides flexible deployment of server nodes in data center carrier networks.
Extensive overlay networking (tunneling) capabilities with stateless offload support for network virtualization using Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN), Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE), Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) and Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (GENEVE). These capabilities optimize performance while reducing the cost of network encapsulation for virtualized workloads and hybrid cloud deployments.
Efficient administration:
Optimized for software-defined networking (SDN) and OpenStack deployments, leveraging NPAR, SR-IOV, tunneling offloads, DPDK support and broad storage protocol integration.
The QLogic FastLinQ 45000 series' expansive set of features and protocols are integrated into the QLogic QConvergeConsole (QCC), which simplifies deployment, diagnostics and management from a single-pane-of-glass, streamlining storage and networking I/O connectivity orchestration.
Lyles continued: "Combining hardware offloads, which reduce demand on the server CPU, with the highest bandwidth available today, the QLogic FastLinQ 45000 series maximizes server utilization and eliminates network congestion. These benefits are key requirements for the upcoming server refresh cycle and the exponential growth in storage."
The new QLogic FastLinQ 45000 series of controllers and adapters will begin shipping this quarter and will be available in multiple form factors and media formats. Initial QLogic-branded offerings will include single-port and dual-port 25GbE adapters and a single-port 100GbE adapter.
