BK3258003-00 Rev. H 03/18 1

Data Sheet

OVERVIEW

• Industry’s rst native quad-port solution supporting 16GFC

technology

• Four ports of 16GFC Enhanced Gen5FC deliver 12,800MBps

aggregate bandwidth

• Up to 2.6million IOPS fuel high performance in AFAs and high-

density virtualized environments

• FC-NVMe capability allows concurrent access to NVMe

™

and

FCP Storage on the same port

• Enhanced reliability, diagnostics and accelerated deployment

StorFusion

™

technology

• Port isolation design offers consistent and reliable performance

on each port

QLogic QLE2694 and QLE2694L

Quad-port Enhanced Gen5��FC (16GFC)

Fibre Channel Adapters

The QLogic QLE2694/QLE2694L quad-port adapters from Cavium

™

are the

industry’s rst Enhanced Gen5FC (16GFC) adapters, boasting industry-

leading native FC performance with low CPU usage and full hardware

ofoads.

ENHANCED GEN 5 FC

QLogic’s unique Enhanced Gen5FC technology provides the industry’s

rst native quad-port 16GFC adapter in both low-prole (QLE2694L) and

standard height (QLE2694) form factors. QLogic’s Enhanced Gen5FC

solution offers higher per-port performance (up to 650K IOPS) with

lower power consumption (3W per port). In addition, QLogic StorFusion

technology delivers streamline provisioning, guaranteed QoS, and

improved resiliency while addressing the needs of IT organizations that

require reliability, integrated management, and guaranteed network

performance.

Enhanced Gen5FC technology resolves data center complexities

by enabling a storage network infrastructure that supports powerful

virtualization features, application-aware services, and simplied

management. The QLE2694/QLE2694L Adapters provide advanced storage

networking features capable of supporting the most demanding virtualized

and private cloud environments while fully leveraging the capabilities

of high-performance 16GFC and all-ash arrays (AFAs). Powerful

management tools automate and simplify SAN provisioning to help reduce

cost and complexity, while the unmatched 16GFC performance eliminates

potential I/O bottlenecks in today’s powerful multiprocessor, multicore

servers.

SUPERIOR PERFORMANCE

The QLE2694/QLE2694L Adapters provide industry-leading application

performance by up to 2.6million IOPS for physical, virtual, and private

cloud environments. QLogic adapters deliver the best throughput

performance in virtualized and non-virtualized environments with

12,800MBps of aggregate throughput, per-second. Integrated QLogic

StarPower

™

technology delivers dynamic power management, which

ensures that the PCIe

host bus link uses the minimum number of PCIe

lanes to meet the required bandwidth.

NVM EXPRESS

SUPPORT

The QLE2694/QLE2694L Adapters support the recently ratied FC-NVMe

(NVMe over Fibre Channel) protocol and can concurrently support FC-

NVMe and FCP-SCSI storage trafc. NVMe storage offers exceptionally

high performance at very low latencies. NVMe works best with a network

that can provide lossless, low-latency, and high-performing transport.

The 2600 Enhanced Gen5FC Adapters bring the best of both worlds by

offering the highest performance and lowest latency access to NVMe and

SCSI storage over an FC network.

BK3258003-00 Rev. H 03/18 2

QLogic QLE2694 and QLE2694L

Data Sheet

VIRTUALIZATION OPTIMIZED

The QLE2694/QLE2694L Adapters support standards-based virtualization

features. Under VMware

ESXi 6.0 and 6.5, I/O requests and responses

can be tagged with the virtual machine-ID (VM-ID) of the appropriate

virtual machine, providing end-to-end visibility at the VM level. Support

for N_Port ID virtualization (NPIV) enables a single FC adapter port to

provide multiple virtual ports for increased network scalability. NPIV allows

a single FC adapter port to participate in multiple virtual fabric domains

for improved availability. In addition, the 16GFC line rate per physical port

delivers unmatched storage performance to maximize the number of

virtual machines per physical server.

QLOGIC STORFUSION TECHNOLOGY

QLogic’s Enhanced Gen5FC 16GFC adapters powered by StorFusion

technology, include advanced capabilities that are enabled when deployed

with supported Brocade

switches. By implementing these industry-

leading solutions together, SAN administrators can take advantage of

enhanced features that improve availability, accelerate deployment, and

increase network performance.

Improved Total Cost of Ownership and Reliability

StorFusion technology delivers advanced link diagnostics, which

improve availability and support for high performance fabrics. Using the

Diagnostics Port feature with a Brocade

switch that supports ClearLink

administrators can quickly run a battery of automated diagnostic tests to

assess the health of links and fabric components.

The QLE2694/QLE2694L Adapters support link cable beaconing (LCB),

which enables administrators to visually identify both ends of a physical

link. In a large data center with hundreds of ports and cables to manage, a

simple command turns on port LED beacons on both ends of a link cable

connection. Administrators can use LCB to quickly identify connection peer

ports without tracing the cable.

QLogic technology includes the read diagnostic parameters (RDP) feature,

which provides detailed port, media, and optics diagnostics. From any

point in the fabric, an administrator can use RDP to easily discover and

diagnose link-related errors and degrading conditions on any N_Port-

to-F_Port link.

The extensive suite of diagnostic tools maximizes uptime and

performance, allowing organizations to address problems before they

impact operations.

Rapid Server Deployment and Orchestration

StorFusion technology includes fabric pre-provisioning services that

enable servers to be quickly deployed, replaced, and moved across the

SAN. By leveraging fabric-assigned port world wide name (FA-WWN)

and fabric-based boot LUN discovery (F-BLD) capabilities, the creation

of zones, LUNs, and other services can be completed before the servers

arrive on site—eliminating time consuming, manual tasks that typically

delay server deployment.

Performance SLA Enforcement with VM-level Quality of Service

Network performance can be dramatically improved by implementing

the industry-standard class-specic control (CS_CTL)-based frame

prioritization QoS, which helps alleviate network congestion. When QLogic

adapters with StorFusion technology are connected to supported SAN

fabrics, trafc is classied as it arrives at the switch, and is then processed

on the basis of congured priorities. Trafc can be prioritized for delivery

or subjected to limited delivery options. As a result, mission-critical

workloads can be assigned a higher priority than less time-sensitive

network trafc to achieve optimized performance.

Higher Resiliency and Performance with Automatic Error Recovery

Forward error correction (FEC) improves performance and link integrity

to support higher end-to-end data rates by automatically recovering

from many transmission errors without re-sending the frames. FEC

automatically detects and recovers from bit errors, which results in higher

availability and performance.

Automatic buffer-to-buffer credit recovery (BB-CR) helps overcome

performance degradation, congestion, and link resets caused by buffer

credit loss, especially on longer distance and high-loss ber connections.

SIMPLIFIED MANAGEMENT

QLogic’s unied management application, QConvergeConsole

(QCC),

provides single-pane-of-glass management across generations of QLogic

FC adapters. In addition, QLogic supports all major APIs for deployment

exibility and integration with third-party management tools, including

VMware vCenter

™

and Brocade Network Advisor.

HIGH AVAILABILITY AND RELIABILITY

QLogic Enhanced Gen 5 FC Adapters continue the tradition of complete

port-level isolation across the FC controller architecture. This architecture,

unlike other vendor solutions, provides independent function, transmit and

receive buffers, an on-chip CPU, DMA channels, and a rmware image for

each port. These features enable complete port-level isolation, prevent

errors and rmware crashes from propagating across all ports, and

provide predictable and scalable performance across all ports. The QLogic

architecture delivers ultimate reliability to meet the needs of mission-

critical enterprise applications with lower power and fewer CPU cycles, all

while maintaining peak performance.

In addition, overlapping protection domains (OPDs) ensure the highest level

of reliability as data moves to and from the PCI

bus and FC network.

The QLE2694/QLE2694L Adapters also provide end-to-end data integrity

with support for T10 Protection Information (T10 PI), which prevents the

risk of silent data corruption in environments running Oracle

Linux

with

the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.