QLogic BR-815 and BR-825
Fibre Channel Adapters
• Provides high-performance, line-rate 8Gbps Fibre Channel for
enterprise-class, reliable SAN connectivity
• Maximizes bus throughput with a Fibre Channel-to-PCIe® Gen2
(x8) bus interface with intelligent lane negotiation
• Delivers unprecedented performance with up to 500,000 IOPS
per port, 1,000,000 IOPS per dual-port adapter, and up to
1600MBps per port, full duplex
Data Sheet
OVERVIEW
SERVER CONNECTIVITY FOR NEXT-GENERATION DATA CENTERS
Today’s IT professionals face the difcult challenge of reducing data center
cost and complexity while satisfying numerous service-level agreements
(SLAs) and performance requirements. As a result, organizations are
seeking ways to improve server and storage usage, reduce ongoing
operational costs, and increase their exibility and responsiveness.
Two major industry trends aimed at reducing cost and complexity—
server consolidation and virtualization—have quickly become the highest
priorities for server administrators. Most data centers were designed
to meet basic connectivity needs for physical servers, switches, and
storage. However, consolidation and virtualization drive new connectivity
requirements that legacy solutions are no longer able to meet, such as
streamlined manageability, increased performance, and virtualization
awareness. Performance of the applications under load and manageability
are often critical concerns for organizations deploying server virtualization.
The BR-815 and BR-825 Fibre Channel adapters are a new class of server
connectivity products with unmatched hardware capabilities and unique
software features. This new class of adapters is designed to help IT
organizations deploy and manage end-to-end SAN services across nextgeneration data centers.
• Provides fabric-based boot LUN discovery for simplied SAN boot
conguration for both DAS and diskless server deployments
• Supports NPIV with up to 255 virtual ports
• Provides optimal support for Windows Server 2012, including
support for Virtual Fibre Channel
CENTRALIZED ADAPTER MANAGEMENT
QLogic’s Host Connectivity Manager (HCM) is an easy-to-use adapter
management tool for conguring, monitoring, and troubleshooting the
QLogic BR-series adapters. HCM enables server administers to quickly
congure BR-series adapters locally or remotely.
HCM scans the SAN environment to discover visible storage resources
and display target LUNs. A simple to use graphical tree view provides fast
access to the managed Host Bus Adapters, Converged Network Adapters,
ports, and target storage resources. HCM also provides notications of
various conditions and problems through a user-dened event lter.
In addition to providing a graphical interface, QLogic also provides
a powerful command line interface (BCU CLI), for scripting and task
automation.
For holistic data center wide management, QLogic HCM is tightly
integrated with Brocade® Network Advisor (BNA) to provide end-toend conguration and management of the entire SAN infrastructure.
Administrators can launch QLogic HCM from within BNA to provide singlepane-of-glass management of QLogic BR-series adapters and Brocade
switches.
BR0058004-00 Rev. A 03/14 1
QLogic BR-815 and BR-825
High
Medium
Low
VM3
VM2
VM1
Hypervisor
OS OS OS
Data Sheet
QLogic also provides open APIs and standards-based interfaces for
integration with popular third party applications.
QLogic adapters also enable VM discovery in VMware® ESX® environments
within BNA. VM discovery provides an end-to-end view of the VM-toLUN path information for all the VMs running on each physical server,
with detailed information such as host OS, assigned CPU and memory
resources, and all the data stores associated with each VM. This level
of visibility into the virtual server infrastructure for SAN administrators
enables them to more efciently manage their storage network resources.
Coupled with N_Port ID virtualization (NPIV), Network Advisor can also
provide end-to-end performance statistics with VM granularity, increasing
visibility down to the LUN level.
Boot-over-SAN enables the deployment of both direct-attached storage
(DAS) point-to-point topology as well as diskless servers and centralized
management of OS images in the shared storage pool. Traditional bootover-SAN environments, however, require access to each individual
adapter BIOS (and each individual server console), making them
cumbersome to congure, laborious to maintain, and prone to human
error. To simplify the management of boot-over-SAN environments, QLogic
adapters provide fabric-based boot LUN discovery—a feature that enables
each server to automatically retrieve its boot LUN information from the
switch fabric. Boot LUN discovery provides a centralized management
point for all boot-over-SAN operations, enabling organizations to fully
reap the benets of diskless servers. In addition, to account for the disk
spinup delay time when servers and storage devices are powered on
simultaneously, users can congure a 1-, 2-, 5-, or 10-minute delay to
boot with the boot-up delay feature.
OPTIMIZED FOR VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS
In a non-virtualized environment, every application is tied to a physical
server, which in turn connects to a physical SAN switch port in a
“static” manner. Applying network policies such as zoning or QoS—or
monitoring application performance—is simple because the application is
permanently associated with the physical port.
With server virtualization, multiple applications reside in a physical server
and share a physical SAN port. Furthermore, applications can move across
the virtualized server infrastructure, based on a number of user-dened
policies, to respond to dynamic business requirements. A virtualizationaware SAN infrastructure and server connectivity solution enables
organizations to apply network policies at the VM level. Such policies will
then be able to “follow” the application transparently as it moves to a new
physical server.
QLogic adapters were built from the ground up with virtualization in mind.
They support NPIV with up to 255 virtual ports, and they are qualied
with all major hypervisor solutions in the industry. Leveraging NPIV
technology, organizations can not only extend QLogic fabric services to
the server, but all the way to the VM and application level. Brocade Server
Application Optimization (SAO) helps IT organizations avoid downtime and
more effectively meet their SLAs by allowing them to apply QoS policies
with a per-VM granularity and ensure that mission-critical VMs will not
be affected in the event of adapter link congestion—even as they move
across the infrastructure. SAO also provides isolation to protect individual
VMs from the effect of slow-drain devices that would otherwise impact the
entire physical server and all applications.
UNMATCHED PERFORMANCE
With the recent advances in server technology, including Intel® Romley
processors, servers are now capable of running more workloads than
ever. This increased capacity drives higher consolidation and virtualization
ratios, with more VMs being deployed per server, which in turn drives
unprecedented I/O requirements. The superior performance of QLogic
adapters provides the necessary bandwidth and I/O power for the most
demanding environments.
Ultimately, increased performance means that businesses of all sizes can
scale their virtual server deployments and virtualize highly demanding
applications with greater condence, resulting in better server resource
utilization and lower capital and operational costs.
SAO extends QoS to the VM level
BR0058004-00 Rev. A 03/14 2
Loading...