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QLogic Stacks up Design Wins with Oracle’s Server and Storage Stack

Oracle integrates applications, middleware and hardware with converged networking

By Deni Connor
Principal Analyst
Storage Strategies NOW
July 2010

QLogic’s converged network adapters have stacked up another design win with the selection by Oracle for their exclusive use in the company’s Oracle SPARC-based and x64 servers.

Specifically, QLogic’s single-chip 8100 Series CNAs will be used in Oracle SPARC M Series enterprise, Oracle SPARC T Series entry and mid-range and Oracle x64 (x86-64) platform servers, where they will speed I/O performance and provide connectivity to Fibre Channel, Ethernet and iSCSI fabrics.

The QLogic 8100 Series CNAs will reduce power and cooling costs and provide higher levels of density when integrated with Oracle server platforms. Further, they reduce equipment and cabling by as much as 50% and reduce management expense and total cost of ownership. Branded by Oracle as Oracle Storage 10GE FCoE PCIe Converged Network Adapters, they provide full offload for FCoE and are compatible with the Solaris operating environment, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM. They also further Oracle’s end-to-end stack approach to data center virtualization from the application, to server and network through to storage.

The dual-port Oracle Storage 10GE FCoE PCIe Converged Network Adapters use the same QLogic 8Gb Fibre Channel stack that Sun server customers have used in the past. These heat sink-less adapters consume much less power than existing CNA chip sets. Based on QLogic’s Network Plus Architecture and available in multiple form factors, including standard and mezzanine cards, the cards support 10Gb Enhanced Ethernet connectivity and an almost unlimited number of virtual machines.

In addition, QLogic announced that Oracle has selected its 8Gb Fibre Channel adapters exclusively for the Sun Storage 7000 Series system, an enterprise-class array also known as Amber Road. The QLogic 2500 Series 8Gb Fibre Channel adapters are integrated into Oracle’s product stack, where they provide connectivity to storage for resource-intensive applications and virtual data center environments. This marks the first time that Amber Road is available with Fibre Channel connectivity, which should make the product attractive to a broader range of customers.

The Sun Storage 7000 family of storage arrays uses the Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target or COMSTAR framework, an OpenSolaris project, that converts an x86 or SPARC Solaris host so it can provide multi-protocol support that can be accessed by Solaris, Windows, Linux or VMware host initiators, allowing high performance and a low cost of ownership. Used in combination with the QLogic 2500 Series 8Gb Fibre Channel Adapters, COMSTAR provides extensive LUN masking and multipathing support, as well as multiple parallel transfers per SCSI command.

Further, the QLogic 2500 Series is a family second-generation of 8Gb Fibre Channel to PCIe adapters designed for multi-processor, multi-core servers. With backward compatibility to 4Gb networks and previous PCIe host bus speeds, the adapters make use of Dynamic Power Management and Cool HBA technologies, which allow it to sense the type of PCI Express bus that is present and consume only the amount of power necessary to run at full speed. QLogic Cool HBA technology allows adapters to run without any air flow, unlike competitive products which require fans to be cool.

SSG-NOW Assessment

QLogic’s push into converged networking and continued support of 8Gb Fibre Channel is seeing real, tangible results with its design wins with NetApp, HP, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems, EMC and now Oracle. The company’s 1st Quarter 2011 earnings call was a testament to the company’s success in Converged Network Adapters and Fibre Channel host connectivity products. Revenue from converged network adapters themselves was $10 million. Revenue from host connectivity products (CNAs and Fibre Channel host bus adapters) was $102.5 million during the first quarter of fiscal 2011 and increased 16% from $88.3 million in the same quarter last year. In addition, Dell’Oro Group tallied QLogic’s Fibre Channel market share at 55.2% in Q1 2010, leading the industry.

QLogic now has exclusive CNA design wins at Oracle for servers and storage, at Netapp for storage, and at IBM Power Systems for its UNIX servers. At a time when Emulex needs to grapple with technology and personnel integration challenges on the CNA front—following its ServerEngines acquisition—QLogic has a clear opportunity to keep executing at a rapid pace. This Oracle win, combined with the recent design win at HP for FCoE Switching technology, raises the profile of QLogic as an overall data center brand.

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