ALISO VIEJO, Calif., Oct. 7, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Marking the beginning of a new era of flexible data center technologies, QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC) today announced a new, third-generation 10GbE converged networking portfolio—code named "3GCNA"—with a number of technology breakthroughs. Based on the third generation of QLogic's market-leading, battle-hardened Network Plus™ Architecture, the portfolio features a trio of new products including 8200 Series 10GbE converged network adapters, 3200 Series 10GbE intelligent Ethernet adapters and a converged LAN-on-motherboard (cLOM) solution.
These products feature a number of industry firsts for the converged networking market, including the ability to:
- Run offloaded Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI and IP (Ethernet) traffic concurrently
- Perform switch-agnostic, virtual machine (VM)-to-VM communication within physical machines
- Deploy quad 1GbE and dual 10GbE ports from a single chip, using advanced FlexLOMTM technology
The 3GCNA portfolio is the first instantiation of QLogic's Adaptive Convergence™ strategy. This strategy builds on the success of the company's recent flex ports introduction and introduces four key, flexible, business-enabling I/O interconnect capabilities:
- ConvergeFlex™: Concurrent Protocol Processing Services
- VMflex™: Advanced Virtualization Services
- FlexOffload™: Multiple Protocol Offload Services
- SecureFlex™: Data Security Services
The new products are designed to address the increasingly complex requirements of virtualized data centers, cloud service providers and the converged enterprise. All of these environments require 10GbE line-rate throughput for virtualized data and storage traffic, support for concurrent IP, FCoE and iSCSI, and low CPU utilization to allow for extreme mobility of VMs. The QLogic 3GCNA portfolio addresses these requirements with products that are protocol- and OS-agnostic and support exabyte-level scalability.
"The IT business is rapidly shifting toward a services-based environment where capacity is virtual, flexible and acquired on demand. This increases pressures on IT infrastructure management to be more efficient, agile and available for thousands of internal and millions or billions of external users," said Dave Vellante, president, Wikibon.org. "Third generation CNAs from QLogic provide the vital interconnect technology that enables its OEMs and channel partners to deliver the flexible data center connectivity layer for next generation, service-based applications."
"Now customers can shift workloads from an iSCSI SAN to an FCoE SAN without rebooting servers or waiting for an outage window," said John Webster, senior analyst and partner, Evaluator Group. "This represents a level of network convergence above and beyond anything else in the marketplace today."
"QLogic's flex ports technology for converged network switches enabled customers to shift protocol support on-the-fly, making protocol-agnostic data mobility a reality," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, ESG. "Today's announcement marks the introduction of QLogic's third generation CNA, which incorporates similar capabilities at the host level, running IP, FCoE or iSCSI protocols at the same time. Shifting protocol support on-the-fly will be important to those organizations needing to dynamically support a multitude of different workloads without disruption. Service providers and large enterprises should especially benefit from this adaptive design that enables them to deploy variable connectivity options in a dynamic way across the data center."
The new 3GCNA portfolio offers the lowest CPU utilization in the industry, freeing up server cycles for business-critical applications and the increased mobility of VMs. The portfolio is fully interoperable with all existing LAN, NAS and SAN environments and supports nearly every hypervisor, operating system and boot environment. The entire portfolio is managed by the new QConvergeConsole™, which provides multi-platform, single-pane-of-glass management of FCoE, iSCSI and IP functions for ease-of-administration and converged network deployment. Available in a number of form factors, the 3GCNA 10GbE converged networking portfolio is slated for general availability this calendar quarter.
"Today's announcement is the result of all of QLogic's combined knowledge, technologies and experience in the data center," said Amit Vashi, vice president, marketing, Host Solutions Group, QLogic. "We continue to invest in the core technologies required to enable Adaptive Convergence for customers who are faced with multiple speeds, protocols, form factors and operating environments, and we are constantly striving to achieve a higher degree of data center efficiency. With the 3GCNA portfolio, customers can now achieve extreme efficiencies in their data and storage networking environments that were previously unattainable."
Unrivaled Tier One OEM Support
Dell
"The benefits of standardizing on a single, unified Ethernet fabric are obvious to a broad range of businesses and organizations," said Brian Payne, director, server platform management at Dell. "Dell continues to work closely with QLogic to provide our mutual customers—such as cloud service providers and enterprises building fully virtualized, converged environments—with innovative, industry-standard solutions that enable administrators to increase efficiencies with enhanced 10GbE performance."
EMC
"We believe that 10Gb Ethernet will play a key role as the backbone of private clouds," said Josh Kahn, vice president, solutions and technical marketing at EMC Corp. "Converged networking for storage applications is an area of focus for both EMC and QLogic and together we have a long history of collaboration and are working to deliver the latest generation of high performance storage network solutions to our customers."
HP
"Clients continue to place a high priority on simplified, integrated and automated solutions in their data centers," said Jim Ganthier, vice president, marketing, metrics and solutions, Industry Standard Servers and Software, HP. "As HP continues to lead the industry with its Converged Infrastructure strategy, we are addressing these solutions requirements with key partners in convergence such as QLogic to help reduce complexity and costs and deliver quantifiable business results."
IBM
"IBM is at the front of the technology curve in 10GbE converged networking technology due in large part to key partners like QLogic," said Alex Yost, vice president and business line executive, IBM BladeCenter. "IBM was the first tier-one system vendor to integrate QLogic's market-leading single chip 8100 Series adapters for native FCoE connectivity in our server portfolio. Building on the established capabilities of the 8100 Series, QLogic's third-generation 10GbE NICs, LOMs and CNAs feature a number of highly compelling industry breakthroughs including the first CNAs with the ability to run multiple protocols including FCoE, iSCSI and Ethernet concurrently, which is highly complementary to our efforts at IBM to simplify and consolidate the data center."
VMware
"VMware vSphere™ is designed to deliver IT as a service through hybrid cloud architecture," said Sachi Sambandan, senior director, ecosystem engineering, VMware. "By using VMware vSphere with QLogic's virtualization-ready technologies such as VMflex, we believe customers will be able to realize the efficiency and agility benefits that result from running multiple protocols concurrently on a single card."
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About QLogic
QLogic (Nasdaq:QLGC) is a global leader and technology innovator in high performance networking, including adapters, switches and ASICs. Leading OEMs and channel partners worldwide rely on QLogic products for their data, storage and server networking solutions. QLogic is a NASDAQ Global Select company and is included in the S&P 500. For more information, visit .
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This press release contains statements relating to future results of the company (including certain beliefs and projections regarding business trends) that are "forward-looking statements" as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied in the forward-looking statements. The company advises readers that these potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: declines in information technology spending levels; potential fluctuations in operating results; gross margins that may vary over time; the stock price of the company may be volatile; the company's dependence on the networking markets served; potential adverse effects of increased market acceptance of blade servers; the ability to maintain and gain market or industry acceptance of the company's products; the company's dependence on a small number of customers; seasonal fluctuations and uneven sales patterns in orders from customers; the company's ability to compete effectively with other companies; declining average unit sales prices of comparable products; a reduction in sales efforts by current distributors; the company's dependence on sole source and limited source suppliers; the company's dependence on relationships with certain third-party subcontractors and contract manufacturers; declines in the market value of the company's investment securities; the complexity of the company's products; sales fluctuations arising from customer transitions to new products; changes in the company's tax provisions or adverse outcomes resulting from examination of its income tax returns; environmental compliance costs; international economic, regulatory, political and other risks; uncertain benefits from strategic business combinations; the ability to attract and retain key personnel; difficulties in transitioning to smaller geometry process technologies; the ability to protect proprietary rights; the ability to satisfactorily resolve any infringement claims; the use of "open source" software in the company's products; changes in regulations or standards regarding energy use of the company's products; computer viruses and other tampering with the company's computer systems; and facilities of the company and its suppliers and customers are located in areas subject to natural disasters.
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CONTACT: QLogic Corporation Media Contact: Steve Zivanic 408.667.8039 steve.zivanic@qlogic.com Investor Contact: Simon Biddiscombe 949.389.7533 simon.biddiscombe@qlogic.com