QLogic Corp.today announced that QLogic technology has been integrated into HP ProLiant BL p-Class blade servers to help enable robust heterogeneous storage area network (SAN) support. The advanced architecture features “Fibre Down,”
an innovative technology that dramatically increases the storage expansion capabilities of blade servers by providing reliable, high bandwidth, long distance connectivity to Fibre Channel SANs. An integration of single-chip Fibre Channel host bus adapters onto blade servers, Fibre Down is designed to enable the deployment of blade server farms in data centers.
“Early blade servers supported edge-of-the-network applications such as Web serving, media streaming, load balancing, caching, and firewall protection,”
said Frank Berry, vice president of marketing, QLogic Corp. “Now with powerful processors and connectivity to Fibre Channel SANs, new HP ProLiant BL p-Class blade servers are equipped to support core business applications in the data center.”
“As the clear industry leader in the blade server market and SANs, HP is proud of this latest innovation with QLogic to bring SAN connectivity to our
HP ProLiant blade server family,” said James Mouton, vice president, Platforms, HP Industry Standard Servers. “HP’s modular blade architecture
offers customers the ability to integrate Fibre for an extremely cost-effective, elegant solution to the ongoing storage challenge they face. Now, HP ProLiant blade servers can easily access hundreds of terabytes of critical data on the SAN.”
The Blade Server Revolution
The Internet has changed the server usage model from single servers to higher density server farms. However, system administrators find deployment
and operation difficult. Server resilience and complex cabling are serious problems for server farms. There are also problems associated with securing
and managing large numbers of servers.
Blade servers address server farm issues by stacking independent servers within a single cabinet. Each blade is an independent system with its own
memory, processor and network connection. Multiple blade servers can be placed in a single rack or enclosure. QLogic offers a family of single chip products that form a complete I/O infrastructure for dense blade servers.
Press Release text courtesy of QLogic.
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