ORLANDO, Fla., Oct. 31, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- Storage Networking World -- QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC), the leader in Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), stackable switches and blade server switches today announced that it will demonstrate end-to-end support of its HBA virtualization technologies at the Fall Storage Networking World show in Orlando, Florida on October 31. The QLogic-organized demonstration, located in the Cisco Systems Technology Showcase area, consists of a real world configuration of multiple Cisco MDS 9216 Fibre Channel switches, QLogic SANblade(r) 2400 Series Fibre Channel HBAs and Veritas Cluster Server from Symantec, all supporting N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) and Virtual Fabric technology in a standard Linux environment.
"QLogic was the first to market with HBA support for virtual SAN (VSAN) technology, now a T11 standard used to deploy Virtual Fabrics," said Frank Berry, vice president of marketing, QLogic Corp. "Now we've combined Virtual Fabric technology with NPIV to create a more secure, manageable, and higher performance environment for virtual machines."
NPIV, supported by the Fibre Channel switch and HBA, allows a single HBA port to function as multiple logical ports, each with its own identity and world wide port name (WWPN). Similarly, both the Fibre Channel switch and HBA work in conjunction to offer Virtual Fabric technology, which provides the ability to create completely isolated network groups. Each network group has its own set of fabric services (i.e. name server, zone server, login server). Software applications and operating systems can leverage NPIV and Virtual Fabric technology by supporting the QLogic HBA virtualization application programming interface (API) to exchange NPIV and Virtual Fabric parameters.
"Cisco pioneered VSAN technology to enable virtual fabrics, which benefit customers through improved resource allocation and provisioning, partitioning of SANs for specific applications or departments, sharing of disaster recovery facilities, and as a valuable tool for SAN migration," said Rajeev Bhardwaj, director of product management, Data Center Business Unit at Cisco. "QLogic support for NPIV and VSANs at the HBA level will help customers to easily deploy end-to-end virtual fabrics."
"Veritas Cluster Server is the leading open systems clustering product used by the Global 2000 for high availability and disaster recovery for their mission-critical applications," said Poulomi Damany, director of product management at Symantec Corp. "VCS takes advantage of the logical HBA ports and VSAN tagging capability provided by the QLogic HBA virtualization API to enable faster failover and improved security of access to SAN storage for these mission-critical applications protected by VCS."
The demonstration showcases how end user applications such as databases can leverage virtualization technologies delivered by Fibre Channel HBAs and switches. Logical ports can easily be created and grouped into secure and isolated Virtual Fabrics. Once the logical ports are created via NPIV and secured via Virtual Fabric technology, the software application attaches each database to a specific WWPN and Virtual Fabric ID, essentially creating an end-to-end secured path to a designated disk. If a network or application failure occurs, the database can easily be migrated to a new server with the original WWPN and Virtual Fabric ID preserved. Thus, storage administrators do not have to change any zoning or LUN masking parameters already configured in the SAN, while maintaining a secure, flexible, and highly available solution.
About QLogic
QLogic is a leading supplier of high performance storage networking solutions including Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), blade server embedded Fibre Channel switches, Fibre Channel stackable switches, iSCSI HBAs, iSCSI routers and storage services platforms for enabling advanced storage management applications. The company is also a leading supplier of server networking products including InfiniBand host channel adapters that accelerate cluster performance. QLogic products are delivered to small-to-medium businesses and large enterprises around the world via its channel partner community. QLogic products are also powering solutions from leading companies like Cisco, Dell, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, NEC, Network Appliance and Sun Microsystems. QLogic is a member of the S&P 500 Index. For more information go to www.qlogic.com.
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