QLogic 2600 Series 16Gb Gen 5 Fibre Channel for Database and Business Analytics - Manual (Page 2)

SN0430953-00 rev. a 07/13 2
White PaPer
QLogic 16Gb Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapter
the new QLogic 2600 Series adapters provide several features that are
designed for supporting enterprise i/O workloads:
• More than 1.2 million iOPS reduce latency in high transaction intensive
applications and virtualized environments
• 16Gbps Fibre Channel per port maximum throughput for high bandwidth
SaN traffic
• reduced hardware, cabling, and management costs by enabling more
applications (VMs) to run on a single server and Fibre Channel port
• Decreased power and cooling costs by using the fewest PCi express ®
lanes in PCie ® Gen3 environments
• Overlapping protection domains (OPD) to ensure a high level of reliability
as data moves to and from the PCi bus and Fibre Channel network
• Complete investment protection for legacy 8Gb and 4Gb Fibre
Channel infrastructure
• Future-proof design enables conversion to a 10Gbe Converged
Network adapter
Adapter Architecture and Design
the different brands of Fibre Channel adapters tested have different designs
for their dual-port adapters. the primary difference is that the QLogic
design has separate processor, memory, and firmware for each port on
the adapter, for both the 8Gb and 16Gb products. With these independent
components in the QLogic design, activity such as high i/O loads, resets,
and recoveries and errors that occur on one port do not impact the other
port. each port on the QLogic 16Gb Fibre Channel adapter is able to achieve
full line rate independent of the activity of the other port.
Fibre Channel SaNs are a key component of most large data center
storage environments. Large it organizations have made huge
investments in Fibre Channel storage technology to meet their high
availability storage and reliability needs. the FCia calculates that more
than $100 billion has been invested in Fibre Channel technology over
the last two decades. Fibre Channel continues to remain the dominant
storage networking architecture for next-generation enterprise
workloads, server virtualization, and cloud architectures. it is known for
its ultra-reliability and mission-critical high performance capabilities in
enterprise data centers.
the data center’s ability to manage mixed workloads spanning real-
time warehousing, storage, and bi-directional online transactional
processing (OLtP) for consumer facing sites and social applications
that require continual consumer dialogue helps to deliver digital
executions. enterprise data centers still have to offer traditional
warehouse support, but being able to execute across all digital channels
and having that capability in one environment has been extremely
helpful in accelerating business as more and more digital executions
are employed. Companies need stability underneath consumer-facing
applications. there is a significant amount of social, retail, and point-
of-sale (POS) data. and many companies produce Web blogs, which
present these challenges:
• Large volumes of data must be interpreted into actionable insights
for clients
• tasks ranging from real-time consumer analytics scoring
to consumer-specific text mining with Web blog data must
be performed
• raw data must be quickly interpreted and turned into actionable
insight for clients in a timely manner
it administrator managers need to quickly gain value from data
warehousing, while supporting diverse analytical requirements and
assisting with building future analytical applications. Fast, easy, and
predictable implementations reduce risk and enable data centers to
achieve rapid strategic value and allow customers to make optimized
business decisions. Using the information from databases and
business analytics helps business-line managers to understand their
customer segments, build customer loyalty, and bring faster time to
value. Best-in-class technology delivers the results that enterprise data
centers demand. this white paper analyzes the storage performance,
reliability, and scalability of the QLogic 2600 Series 16Gb Gen 5 Fibre
Channel adapter compared to the previous-generation (8Gb) adapter
from QLogic.
Executive Summary