Qlogic Fabric Freedom Equals More Convergence

Note: The path to converged networking has to date been driven mostly from the networking side of the street. While we can argue whether Fiber Channel over Ethernet is more Fibre Channel or Ethernet, there's no argument that Cisco's been its biggest cheerleader. Qlogic's new Fabric Freedom product line provides a more storage centric and incremental path to converged networking by supplying ports that can switch between 16Gbps Fibre Channel or 10Gbps Ethernet, with or without FCoE, as your data center evolves.

The path to converged networking has to date been driven mostly from the networking side of the street. While we can argue whether Fiber Channel over Ethernet is more Fibre Channel or Ethernet, there's no argument that Cisco's been its biggest cheerleader. Qlogic's new Fabric Freedom product line provides a more storage centric and incremental path to converged networking by supplying ports that can switch between 16Gbps Fibre Channel or 10Gbps Ethernet, with or without FCoE, as your data center evolves.

While I'm a firm believer that Ethernet always wins, the path to converged networking has required a significant upfront investment in FCoE capable switching to be the first step. Your shiny new nth generation CNA isn't going to do you any good if you don't have a 10Gbs switch to plug it into. If you need to buy a dozen, or a thousand, new servers before you settle on a new datacenter switching architecture, you'll have to equip them with quad 1Gbps Ethernet cards and FC HBAs.

Qlogic's dual port FlexSuite adapter can be configured to be either a 16Gbps Fibre Channel HBA or a 10Gbps Ethernet CNA complete with up to four virtual NICs per port with bandwidth management, SR-IOV and protocol offloads including TCP, iSCSI and FCoE.

When you install the server into your FC network and configure it to be an HBA, it will look and smell like the Qlogic HBAs the majority of Fibre Channel attached servers in the world already run. You can plug it into your 4, 8 or 16Gbps Fibre Channel network and be up and running tout de suite.

When you get around to installing 10Gbps switches, you can swap out the Fibre Channel optics for 10Gbps Ethernet optics or DAC (Direct Attach Copper) cables, flash in the Ethernet personality firmware and plug it in to run converged networking. I can even see some companies installing a pair of FlexSuite cards for non-converged data and storage traffic using the same hardware.

Qlogic promises SFP+ and 10Gbase-T versions, though I can't see Fibre Channel over twisted pair getting any traction. While you can switch the card's personality from FC to Ethernet or vice versa, both ports have to run the same protocol at the same time.

Qlogic also announced a companion switch that can switch ports back and forth between 10Gbps Ethernet with DCB and 16Gbps Fibre Channel. The UA5900 (The UA stands for Universal Access) has 52 SFP+ flex ports plus 4 QSFP ports that can run 40Gbps Ethernet or 64Gbps Fiber Channel. Like many Fibre Channel switches, you buy it with some ports enabled and buy licenses to turn up additional ports in 4 or 12 port increments.

Most vendors enable Ethernet on their base switches and charge a significant sum for the storage protocol support to run FCoE. Qlogic thinks of this as a Fibre Channel switch that does Ethernet more than as an Ethernet switch and a Fibre Channel switch in the same box that speak FCoE to each other as most first generation FCoE switches were. They do charge for a converged networking license to let FCoE servers communicate with FC attached storage, but the base switch will support native FCoE storage access without a special license.

It looks to me like Qlogic's done a good job defending their position as the HBA leader and is delivering a new approach to FCoE that can be implemented more incrementally than Cisco or Brocade's model. On the other hand, the UA5900 doesn't have any TRILL like Ethernet fabric support or virtual server security management and I'm betting the future of data center networking is in that direction.