QLogic BR-1860 Fabric User Manual

Data Sheet

QLogic BR-1860

Fabric Adapter

••Provides a class of adapters that meets all Fibre Channel and Ethernet connectivity needs in cloud-enabled data centers

••Supports Gen 5 Fibre Channel and 10GbE DCB connectivity for TCP/IP, iSCSI, and FCoE with QLogic AnyIO® technology

••Consolidates I/O devices and optimizes QoS with QLogic vFLink technology

••Enhanced virtualization support, including Windows Server® 2012 Virtual Fibre Channel and network QoS (bandwidth management) functionality

••Centralized management through single pane-of-glass by integration with Brocade® Network Advisor

OVERVIEW

To keep pace with dynamic and growing business demands, many organizations are transitioning their data centers to private cloud architectures to leverage the many benefits of virtualization. This approach enables them to consolidate, scale, simplify, and automate their IT resources to increase business agility while reducing capital and operational expenditures. The QLogic BR-1860, designed for today’s data centers, simplifies the journey to the private cloud.

Server virtualization continues to be a key technology for enabling private cloud architectures. Organizations worldwide are taking virtualization to the next level, increasing virtual machine (VM) densities and virtualizing mission-critical workloads. This trend is increasing demand for shared storage and flatter, more scalable networks—as well as higher bandwidth and I/O capacity for client/server and storage networks.

To help address that demand, the BR-1860 Fabric Adapter meets all the connectivity needs of cloud-enabled data centers while providing unmatched performance, application-aware services, unified management, and reduced cost and complexity. It is the simplest, most

flexible, and most powerful server connectivity adapter designed to extend fabric services to VMs and applications in highly demanding virtualized environments (Figure 1).

A SINGLE ADAPTER FOR ALL CONNECTIVITY NEEDS

Available in single-port and dual-port models, the BR-1860 features QLogic AnyIO technology, making it the industry’s first multiprotocol server connectivity product designed for highly virtualized, cloud-enabled data centers. The BR-1860 is a new class of adapters that combines a Gen 5 Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter with a 10-gigabit Ethernet (GbE) Converged Network Adapter and a NIC to support native Fibre Channel, TCP/IP, data center bridging (DCB) Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and iSCSI running simultaneously in a single product.

Gen 5 Fibre Channel is the purpose-built, data center-proven network infrastructure for storage, delivering unmatched reliability, simplicity, and 16Gbps performance. The BR-1860 Fabric Adapter with Gen 5 Fibre Channel unleashes the full potential of high-density server virtualization, cloud architectures, and next-generation storage.

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QLogic BR-1860

Data Sheet

QLogic BR-1860 Fabric Adapters

	Ethernet				Fibre Channel

Brocade Network Advisor

Orchestration

Figure 1. BR-1860 Fabric Adapter technology extends Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabric services to the VMs and applications

Organizations have the flexibility to choose, on a port-by-port basis, the adapter type and connectivity protocol that are most appropriate for their applications and their business requirements. This unmatched flexibility allows organizations to standardize on a single adapter for all of their connectivity needs. IT departments can realize capital and operational savings by consolidating multiple lower-speed Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters and 1GbE NICs into a single adapter, acquiring space-efficient 1U rack-mount servers, connecting to existing Fibre Channel and Ethernet networks without requiring additional switch ports, and future-proofing their data centers for a seamless transition to multiprotocol networks.

Delivering full-duplex, line-rate 16Gbps Fibre Channel and 10GbE speeds, and over one million IOPS per dual-port adapter for storage applications— including Fibre Channel, FCoE, and iSCSI—the QLogic BR-1860 is the ideal platform to support the most demanding mission-critical workloads in the largest data centers. The BR-1860 supports full FCoE protocol offload as well as stateless networking offloads for 10GbE, including TCP checksum and segmentation offloads for improved performance and more efficient CPU utilization.

DESIGNED FOR THE PRIVATE CLOUD

Virtualization is transforming the data center, essentially moving the access layer of the network into the server. In addition to virtualizing I/O devices to allow them to be shared by the VMs, hypervisors have become, by necessity, software-based Ethernet switches that provide networking services for VMs—using CPU cycles and hindering virtualization scalability and performance. Even with the most powerful processors, at 16Gbps Fibre Channel and 10GbE speeds, hypervisors simply cannot keep up with I/O, and line-rate performance becomes impossible to achieve.

By implementing virtual machine optimized ports (VMOPs), the BR-1860 leverages hypervisor multiqueue technologies such as VMware® NetQueue and Microsoft® VMQ to offload the incoming network packet classification and sorting tasks from the hypervisor onto the adapter, freeing the CPU and enabling line-rate performance.

I/O Virtualization (IOV) and Virtual Switching

The BR-1860 supports QLogic virtual Fabric Link (vFLink) technology, which partitions a single adapter into as many as eight virtual adapters called vNICs. This is done in hardware by using multiple physical functions (PFs) at the PCIe® bus level, appearing as separate physical devices at the OS level. These virtual links can be assigned minimum and/or maximum bandwidth levels allocated in 100Mbps increments, with a maximum of 10Gbps for Ethernet. This helps organizations overcome the proliferation of adapters in virtual environments while maintaining management isolation and quality of service (QoS) for different types of networks, including production, backup, management, or live migration (Figure 2).

Figure 2. QLogic vFLink I/O virtualization technology enables I/O consolidation

To further improve performance in virtual environments, VMs can bypass the hypervisor and access I/O devices directly, leveraging server chipset technologies such as Intel® virtualization technology for directed I/O (VT-d) or AMD® I/O virtualization (AMD-Vi).

The BR-1860 will help organizations overcome this limitation through its ability to support the PCI-SIG® single root input/output virtualization

(SR-IOV) specification1, which extends QLogic vFLink technology to support up to 255 virtual fabric links. SR-IOV utilizes PCIe virtual functions (VFs), which are lightweight PCI functions that are assigned to the VMs while

the hypervisor retains control of the underlying PF. SR-IOV enables an efficient sharing of I/O devices for VMs as well as direct I/O for increased performance (Figure 3).

1 SR-IOV is hardware capable.

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