QLogic 2600 Series vSphere 5 Virtual Server Engine - Manual (Page 14)

In Transaction-Intensive and Bandwidth-Intensive Environments
With the availability of Gen 5 Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters, larger block I/Os have doubled their
throughput compared to 8Gb per second bandwidth. Together with better CPU efficiency per I/O,
throughput for random I/Os for small block sizes have increased because their throughput is no longer
bounded by the Fibre Channel link speed of 8Gbps as before.
For virtualized environments, the ability of the adapter to scale with workload is the most critical measure of
performance. Testing by QLogic shows the advantage of the QLogic QLE2672 as workloads increase for both
read-only and read-write workloads. This performance advantage (50 percent for read-only and 25 percent
for mixed read-write) has a significant impact on application performance, which is critical to meeting SLAs
for Tier-1 applications.
Having doubled the throughput rates with the newly available QLogic Gen 5 Fibre Channel Host Bus
Adapters, the vSphere 5.1 platform can support more storage devices and meet bandwidth requirements
using the same number of Fibre Channel links. The doubled bandwidth for large block transfers can benefit
applications like VMware vSphere Storage vMotion. The improvement in random read IOPS at a 4KB block
size, for example, can benefit database application clients. Applications are no longer limited by the existing
8Gb Fibre Channel bandwidth to meet their peak performance requirements.
Doubled I/O Throughput
Throughput
The amount of data processed or transferred in a given
amount of time measured in megabytes per second (MBps).
“Throughput” and “Bandwidth” are used interchangeably.
IOPS and MBps Performance as Workloads Increase
In testing by QLogic, the QLE2672 out-performed the Emulex LPe16002B in terms of IOPS and MBps performance.