The QLogic Enhanced Generation 5 (Gen 5) 16 Gb Fibre Channel (FC) Single and Dual-port Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) for Lenovo ThinkSystem and System x servers offer industry leading native FC performance with extremely low CPU usage with full hardware offloads.
Enhanced Gen 5 FC technology provides advanced storage networking features capable of supporting the most demanding virtualized and private cloud environments, while fully leveraging the capabilities of high-performance 16 Gb FC (16GFC) and all-flash arrays (AFAs). Powerful management tools automate and simplify SAN provisioning to help reduce cost and complexity, while the unmatched 16 Gbps performance eliminates potential I/O bottlenecks in today's powerful multiprocessor, multicore servers.
- Link cable beacon (LCB) enables administrators to visually identify both ends of a physical link by flashing HBA's LEDs, simplifying identification of the connection peers within server racks without tracing the cable.
- Read diagnostic parameters (RDP) feature provides detailed port, media, and optics diagnostics to easily discover and diagnose link-related errors and degrading conditions on any N_Port-to-F_Port link.
- Using the Brocade ClearLink diagnostic port (D_Port) available on the Brocade Gen 5 switches, administrators can quickly run automated diagnostic tests to assess the health of links and fabric components.
- Fabric-assigned port worldwide name (FA-WWN) and fabric-based boot LUN discovery (F-BLD) pre-provisioning services allow servers to be quickly deployed, replaced, and moved across the SAN; the creation of zones, LUNs, and other services can be completed before the servers arrive on site.
- Support for Message Signaled Interrupts eXtended (MSI-X) improves host utilization and enhances application performance.
- T10-PI data integrity with high performance offload provides end-to-end data corruption protection.
- Industry-standard class-specific control (CS_CTL)-based frame prioritization Quality of Service (QoS) helps alleviate network congestion by prioritizing traffic for time-sensitive mission critical workloads for optimized performance.
- Support forward error correction (FEC) to enhance reliability of transmission and thereby performance.
- Independent function, transmit and receive buffers, an on-chip CPU, DMA channels, and a firmware image for each port enable complete port-level isolation, prevent errors and firmware crashes from propagating across all ports, and provide predictable and scalable performance across all ports.
- Maximum performance with up to 1.3 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) to support larger server virtualization deployments and scalable cloud initiatives, and performance to match new multicore processors, SSDs/flash storage, and faster server host bus architectures.
