03 September 2010
Friday
Nehalem, virtualization pave way for FCoE ramp-up
By Khoo Boo Leong | Sep 14, 2009
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PrintThe advent of Nehalem servers and the increasing prevalence of virtualization are paving the way for Fiber Channel (FC) sites to consider higher-end connectivity such as 8Gbit adapters and switches as well as Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to raise data center efficiencies.
“The Nehalem EX [will drive demand for products that] accommodate 8Gbit FC and FCoE, 10Gbit Ethernet (10GbE) adapters and LAN on motherboard (LOM),” said Steve Zivanic, senior director of Corporate Communications at QLogic Corp. “Less than a year ago, we didn’t have all these. In our most recent quarter ended June, 8Gb FC revenues doubled and now represents about 10% of our host product revenue.”
For the first half of 2009, QLogic increased its revenue share for storage area network (SAN) FC adapters to 55.2% or 1.9% more than its full year 2008 share, according to market research firm the Dell'Oro Group.
FCoE wave
Moving forward, “FCoE will be a significant growth driver because of the cost savings,” said Martin Darling, vice-president of Asia-Pacific Japan Sales at QLogic Corp. “Customers are interested because it offers simplicity which is measured by reduced cost, cabling, switches and port count.”
At the same time, Darling expects all major OEMs -- which account for 75% of QLogic’s revenues -- to have an FCoE offering within the next six months. QLogic has been first-to-market with a single-chip Converged Network Adapter (CNA).
“We have our own FC and Ethernet drivers or stacks in our host bus adapters, our own silicon and our own CNA. We began developing the silicon and integrating the two stacks over three years ago. So, we’re able to produce our own ASIC and get it to market ahead of our competitors,” said Zivanic. “We think FCoE will become a material part of our revenues come second half of 2010.”
FC stacks up
One key differentiator between one FCoE host adapter from another is the strength of the FC stack. QLogic’s adapters support a wide range of vendor solutions and platforms including HP-UX, VMware, Solaris 10, Hyper-V, Citrix, tape storage and high-end disk arrays.
EMC, for instance, recently qualified the QLogic 8100 Series CNAs for use with the Symmetrix V-Max and DMX, the Clariion CX4 networked storage systems as well as the Celerra NS unified storage systems.
