ALISO VIEJO, Calif., Feb. 20, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- QLogic (Nasdaq:QLGC), a leading supplier of high performance network infrastructure solutions, today announced that Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com have awarded the QLogic FlexSuite 2600 Series 16Gb Fibre Channel adapter the gold cup and The 2012 Product of the Year in the Networking Equipment category. Among all products submitted for the Networking Equipment category this year, the QLogic 2600 Series was the only product presented with an award.
"As organizations upgrade their SANs to 16Gb Fibre Channel and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), networking products that are upgradeable to the newest technologies but preserve investments in existing infrastructure will be essential," remarked Storage Magazine/SearchStorage.com. "The sixth-generation QLogic 2600 Series Fibre Channel adapter supports 16Gb Fibre Channel throughput per port with full hardware offload, and is backwards-compatible to 8Gb and 4Gb networks. More impressively, QLogic's 2600 Series is transformable to a converged network adapter (CNA) to support 10GbE networks. With a single PCI Express (PCIe) slot, you can install a host bus adapter for your 8Gb or 4Gb network, and use the same PCIe 3.0 card when you upgrade to 16Gb Fibre Channel or 10GbE."
The Gold Cup is the highest award level presented by Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com. Products were judged by a panel of users, analysts, consultants, and Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com editors. Products were rated based on innovation, performance, ease of integration into environment, ease of use and manageability, functionality and value.
One judge commented, "CNA cards are approaching a strategic default, and the flexibility of this card fits an unpredictable IT future." The publication noted that a field-programmable firmware upgrade is all that's required to transform the QLogic 2600 Series Fibre Channel adapter into a QLogic 8300 Series 10GbE CNA that supports Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI traffic.
The QLogic FlexSuite 2600 Series scored high marks for functionality and performance. Editors acknowledged that the 2600 Series can provide up to 1.2 million IOPs as a full-duplex, line-rate 16Gb Fibre Channel adapter and up to one million IOPs as a 10GbE CNA.
"The FlexSuite 2600 Series with I/O Flex technology represents the next evolution in networking versatility and industry-leading performance," said Amit Vashi, vice president of marketing, Host Solutions Group, QLogic. "With the flexibility to support 10Gb Ethernet and 16Gb Fibre Channel, this award-winning adapter makes it easy for organizations to maximize investments in existing networks and migrate to next-generation infrastructures at their own pace. QLogic's high-availability architecture delivers predictable performance with increasing workloads in virtualized environments, unlike that of our nearest competitor."
QLogic 2600 Series 16Gb Fibre Channel adapters consist of several compelling attributes:
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The Ultimate in Performance: The QLogic 2600 Series handles three times the transactions (1.2 Million IOPs) and double the throughput (6000 MBps) of 8Gb Fibre Channel, dramatically increasing application performance and cutting backup times in half. QLogic 2600 Series adapters are optimized for performance in next-generation servers with support for the new PCIe 3.0 bus architecture.
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High Availability Architecture: QLogic's unique port-level isolation architecture adds an additional layer of reliability and security, and ensures that if one port should encounter issues, the second, isolated port will continue to function securely and without interruption. This enables the QLogic 2600 Series to offer secure, deterministically predictive and scalable dual-port performance.
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Optimized for Virtualization: The QLogic 2600 Series provides a scalable architecture for higher virtual machine (VM) deployment per server while still providing full offload capabilities with increased bandwidth allocation to each VM. QLogic 2600 Series adapters further enhance VM mobility by increasing availability to meet peak-demand workloads. The QLogic 2600 Series includes support for advanced features such as virtual Fibre Channel (vFC) in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and uniquely provides dynamic setting of fine-grained Quality of Service (QoS) on a per VM basis.
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Simplified Management: QLogic QConvergeConsole (QCC) provides a single pane of glass to remotely manage all Fibre Channel adapters and 10Gb Ethernet converged network adapters throughout the network. The QConvergeConsole is integrated in VMware vCenter. In addition to managing the QLogic adapters, it simplifies the physical and logical topology mapping of the entire virtual SAN.
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Leadership, Confidence and Trust: The underlying QLogic Fibre Channel stack is proven in more than 13 million ports shipped to enterprise data centers around the world.
- Pervasive Interoperability: QLogic solutions are tested and interoperable with more than 10,000 industry products. QLogic's networking stack includes pervasive support for the leading operating system (OS) platforms and hypervisors including Windows Server with Hyper-V, VMware ESX/ESXi, Red Hat and SUSE Linux (including KVM), Solaris and Citrix XenServer. The 2600 Series shares the same Fibre Channel stack with the millions of QLogic 8Gb and 4Gb Fibre Channel adapter ports already installed in enterprises around the globe.
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QLogic—the Ultimate in Performance
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. For more information, visit www.qlogic.com.
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