QLogic's SANblade line of products are Fibre Channel and iSCSI HBAs served in multiple flavors for both organizations and OEM deployments. The product line ranges from single, 2 Gb port, 25MHz SBus cards to dual 8 Gb/sec FC PCI Express cards running over a 5.0 GHz bus.

Multiple operating systems are supported by the cards, including Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, and Mac OS X; and the cards are certified for use on multiple hardware platforms, including those from Dell, HP, Fujitsu, IBM, and Apple.

The SANblade cards are split into two general product lines: HBAs for use in standard servers and those for use in blade servers.

Cards in the standard server designation are served with single, dual, or quadruple optical ports, (the QLA2310 offers a single copper port) in 2, 4, or 8 Gb flavors. Supported bus types include SBus (25 MHz), cPCI (66 MHz), PCI-X (66/133 MHz), PCI-X 2.0 (266 MHz), and PCI Express (2.5/5 GHz).

As a sampling, more recent entries in the line include the QEM2462, which offers dual 4 Gb ports in an ExpressModule form factor (the QEM2462 is offered to OEMs only), and the quad port QLE2464, also with 4 Gb ports (SFF multimode optic with LC-style connectors). Both offer RoHS 6 compliance; auto negotiation to 4/2/1 Gb/sec; support for N_Port (P2P, switched fabric), and NL_Port (arbitrated loop) deployments; support for 2,048 concurrent logins; and support for FCP (SCSI-FCP), IP (FC-IP), and FC-TAPE (FCP-2) protocols. Also worth noting are the QLE2560/QLE2562 cards, single/dual FC port (respectively) 5.0 GHz PCI Express cards boasting 8 Gb/sec port speeds.

For blade servers, the vendor offers HBAs for Dell (dual port 2 Gb), HP (dual port 4 Gb), IBM (dual port 4 Gb; the QMI3472 offers 2-each of FC and Ethernet ports), and now Sun (dual port 4 Gb/sec FC and a quad port card--two each of 4 Gb/sec FC and 1 Gb/sec Ethernet--both cards delivered in PCI Express with a 2.5 GHz bus speed).

In addition to the Fibre Channel offerings, the vendor also serves iSCSI/Ethernet cards with single or dual 1 Gb copper or optical ports. iSCSI cards are available in PCI-X and PCI Express form factors.

Other features include a one-driver-per-operating-system design (the vendor states that their driver suite supports hardware platforms including Intel (IA32, IEM64T), AMD (Opteron64), and SUN (SPARC)); included setup wizards; a command line interface; utilities for firmware, driver, boot code, and NVRAM; and SNIA HBA API V2, SMI-S, and FDMI application programming interfaces.

Note that not all features described above may be available in all adapters.

Visit the QLogic Web site for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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