QLogic flexes the Bullet, introduces new paradigm of network convergence

By Deni Connor
Principal analyst, Storage Strategies NOW
June 2010

The battle for network convergence heated up this week as QLogic announced that HP has selected the QLogic ‘Bullet’ FCoE Switching ASIC to power its Virtual Connect FlexFabric switch module for the company’s new BladeSystem platforms.

The details
Specifically, the Virtual Connect FlexFabric 10Gb/24-port switch module uses the Bullet ASIC to pool and abstract SAN and LAN connections between BladeServers and virtual machines and storage. It converges Ethernet, Fibre Channel and iSCSI onto a common fabric and allocates bandwidth across eight connections per each dual-port FlexFabric adapter, allowing businesses to consolidate network access at the server edge by as much as 95%.

This new FCoE switching technology provides protocol-agnostic data mobility, enabling customers to map Virtual Ports to Virtual Machines across any protocol in the data center.

The Bullet, a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) switching ASIC, allows ports—dubbed “flex ports” by QLogic– on the HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric module to be dynamically allocated to 10Gb Ethernet, Fibre Channel or iSCSI — a feature that outshines competitive FCoE switching technology from both Cisco and Brocade, whose products must be manually configured to the desired protocol and which do not allow for the dynamic adjustment needed in today’s converged network infrastructures. The Bullet is based on a scalable, non-blocking -standards-based architecture that can allow server, network or storage administrators to add, move and change network connections in minutes rather than the hours required of manually configured switches and adapters.

The Bullet was designed in-house at QLogic and can be used as the basis for developing a number of FCoE switching options for OEMs, including blade switches, edge switches, I/O modules and top-of-rack (TOR) switches. We would expect QLogic to introduce follow-on FCoE switching solutions in the coming quarters.

SSG-NOW Assessment
Cloud service providers will benefit from flex ports because they have highly variable workloads and depending on peak activity from each client, may need to run one workload on Fibre Channel while allocating some additional ports to iSCSI or 10GbE. This gives them the flexibility where they don’t have to hard wire everything in the data center. QLogic is effectively virtualizing and liquefying the network, enabling customers to partition ports however they like.

The QLogic implementation of the ASIC is complementary to the company’s relationships with OEMs and channel partners. For example, customers can rely on HP and QLogic to provide not only FCoE solutions, but LAN on motherboard for HP DL580 and DL585 G7 servers, stackable HP StorageWorks SN6000 8Gb Fibre Channel switches and the FCoE-enabled HP StorageWorks MPX200 Storage Router. The fact that QLogic won a major FCoE technology design win over the competition speaks volumes about the importance of its flex ports technology and their strategic relevance to HP. The only downside of this announcement is the dilemma that industry analysts will now face: how do you track port shipments when the port is no longer sold as a fixed, hard wired protocol transmission device?