Demartek QLogic 2600 Series FC HBA Evaluation

4 December 2012

Explosive growth in the complexity and amount of data of today’s datacenter environments is pervasive. We see more users, more devices and increasing numbers of virtual machines per physical server than in the past. Cloud computing, big data, and increased backup and recovery burdens are driving the need for higher storage bandwidth.

Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs) are a key component of most large datacenter storage environments. Large IT organizations have made huge investments in Fibre Channel storage technology to meet their high availability storage and reliability needs. According to the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), 2012 is the year of “10-10-10”, in which it is expected to see 10 million Fibre Channel ports shipped (adapter and switch ports), $10 billion invested in Fibre Channel technology, and 10 Exabytes (EB) of Fibre Channel storage shipped. 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 and is known for its ultra-reliability and mission critical high performance capabilities in enterprise datacenters.

QLogic has released its PCIe 3.0 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) host bus adapter (HBA), known as the QLogic 2600 series Fibre Channel HBA.

This report analyzed the storage performance, reliability and scalability of QLogic 2600 Series FC HBAs relative to those from Emulex as well as its previous generation adapter.

View the Demartek QLogic 2600 Series FC HBA Evaluation
(PDF, 727 KB)