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The Tasting Notes for 64G Fibre Channel

By Nishant Lodha, Director of Product Marketing – Emerging Technologies, Marvell

While age is just a number and so is new speed for Fibre Channel (FC), the number itself is often irrelevant and it’s the maturity that matters – kind of like a bottle of wine! Today as we make a toast to the data center and pop open (announce) the Marvell® QLogic® 2870 Series 64G Fibre Channel HBAs, take a glass and sip into its maturity to find notes of trust and reliability alongside of operational simplicity, in-depth visibility, and consistent performance.

Big words on the label? I will let you be the sommelier as you work through your glass and my writings.

Marvell QLogic 2870 series 64GFC HBAs
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Got Chemistry? Windows Server 2022 and Marvell QLogic Fibre Channel

By Nishant Lodha, Director of Product Marketing – Emerging Technologies, Marvell

Recently, Microsoft® announced the general availability of Windows® Server 2022, a release that us geeks refer to with its codename “Iron.” At Marvell we have long worked to integrate our server connectivity solutions into Windows and like to think of the Marvell® QLogic® Fibre Channel (FC) technology as that tiny bit of “carbon” that turns “iron” to “steel” – strong yet flexible and designed to make business applications shine. Let’s dive into the bits and bytes of how the combination of Windows Server 2022 and Marvell QLogic FC makes for great chemistry.

If you ask hybrid cloud IT managers and architects to identify the three things they need more of from their IT infrastructure, the responses would resoundingly focus on the following: improved security, scalability that does not break the bank, and an easy way to manage the hardest things. Based on the input from our customers on the challenges that they face in today’s demanding and evolving IT environments, Marvell has continued to enhance its QLogic FC technology to address these critical requirements. Marvell QLogic FC technology builds on the new features of Microsoft Windows Server 2022 and further extends the security, scalability and management capabilities to offer server connectivity solutions that are designed specifically with our customers’ needs in mind.

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From Strong Awareness to Decisive Action: Meet Mr. QLogic

By Nishant Lodha, Director of Product Marketing – Emerging Technologies, Marvell

Marvell® Fibre Channel HBAs are getting a promotion and here is the announcement email –

“I am pleased to announce the promotion of “Mr. QLogic® Fibre Channel” to Senior Transport Officer, Storage Connectivity at Enterprise Datacenters Inc. Mr. QLogic has been an excellent partner and instrumental in optimizing mission critical enterprise application access to external storage over the past 20 years. When Mr. QLogic first arrived at Enterprise Datacenters, block storage was in a disarray and efficiently scaling out performance seemed like an unsurmountable challenge. Mr. QLogic quickly established himself as a go-to leader and trusted partner for enabling low latency access to external storage across disk and flash. Mr. QLogic successfully collaborated with other industry leaders like Brocade and Mr. Cisco MDS to lay the groundwork for a broad set of innovative technologies under the StorFusion™ umbrella. In his new role, Mr. QLogic will further extend the value of StorFusion by bringing awareness of Storage Area Network (SAN) congestion into the server, while taking decisive action to prevent bottlenecks that may degrade mission critical enterprise application performance.

Please join me in congratulating QLogic on this well-deserved promotion.”

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Put a Cherry on Top! Introducing FC-NVMe v2

By Nishant Lodha, Director of Product Marketing – Emerging Technologies, Marvell

Once upon a time, data centers confronted a big problem – how to enable business-critical applications on servers to access distant storage with exceptional reliability. In response, the brightest storage minds invented Fibre Channel. Its ultra-reliability came from being implemented on a dedicated network and buffer-to-buffer credits. For a real-life parallel, think of a guaranteed parking spot at your destination, and knowing it’s there before you leave your driveway. That worked fairly well. But as technology evolved and storage changed from spinning media to flash memory with NVMe interfaces, the same bright minds developed FC-NVMe. This solution delivered a native NVMe storage transport without necessitating rip-and-replace by enabling existing 16GFC and 32GFC HBAs and switches to do FC-NVMe. Then came a better understanding of how cosmic rays affect high-speed networks, occasionally flipping a subset of bits, introducing errors.

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FastLinQ® NICs + RedHat SDN

By Nishant Lodha, Director of Product Marketing – Emerging Technologies, Marvell

A bit of validation once in a while is good for all of us – that’s pretty true whether you are the one providing it or, conversely, the one receiving it.  Most of the time it seems to be me that is giving out validation rather than getting it.  Like the other day when my wife tried on a new dress and asked me, “How do I look?”  Now, of course, we all know there is only one way to answer a question like that – if they want to avoid sleeping on the couch at least.

Recently, the Marvell team received some well-deserved validation for its efforts.  The FastLinQ 45000/41000 high performance Ethernet Network Interface Controllers (NICs) series that we supply to the industry, which support 10/25/50/100GbE operation, are now fully qualified by Red Hat for Fast Data Path (FDP) 19.B.

The FastLinQ 45000 and 41000 Ethernet Adapter Series from Marvell

Figure 1: The FastLinQ 45000 and 41000 Ethernet Adapter Series from Marvell

Red Hat FDP is employed in an extensive array of the products found within the Red Hat portfolio – such as the Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP), as well as the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Virtualization (RHV).  Having FDP-qualification means that FastLinQ can now address a far broader scope of the open-source Software Defined Networking (SDN) use cases – including Open vSwitch (OVS), Open vSwitch with the Data Plane Development Kit (OVS-DPDK), Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SR-IOV) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

Red hat logos

The engineers at Marvell worked closely with our counterparts at Red Hat on this project, in order to ensure that the FastLinQ feature set would operate in conjunction with the FDP production channel. This involved many hours of complex, in-depth testing.  By being FDP 19.B qualified, Marvell FastLinQ Ethernet Adapters can enable seamless SDN deployments with RHOSP 14, RHEL 8.0, RHEV 4.3 and OpenShift 3.11.

Being widely recognized as the data networking ‘Swiss Army Knife,’ our FastLinQ 45000/41000 Ethernet adapters benefit from a highly flexible programmable architecture. This architecture is capable of delivering up to 68 million small packet per second performance levels, plus 240 SR-IOV virtual functions and supports tunneling while maintaining stateless offloads. As a result, customers have the hardware they need to seamlessly implement and manage even the most challenging of network workloads in what is becoming an increasingly virtualized landscape. Supporting Universal RDMA (concurrent RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP operation), unlike most competing NICs, they offer a highly scalable and flexible solution.  Learn more here.

SDN powered by FastLinQ NIC packet processing engine

 

Validation feels good. Thank you to the RedHat and Marvell team!

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