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QLogic SANbox2 Switch Outperforms Competition

QLogic Corp, the company that powers storage area networks (SANs), has announced that its SANbox2 16 Port Fibre Channel switch outperformed all competitive offerings in tests performed by QLogic and conducted with Spirent Communications' SmartBits 6000B and SmartFabric testing tools, the industry-first product for evaluating network switch performance.

Using the SmartBits 6000B with FBC-3602A test modules and the SmartFabric application, the SANbox2 16 port switch achieved the maximum wire-rate throughput of 2GBits/sec Fibre Channel simultaneously for all ports (aggregate of 3,362 Mbytes/sec). In addition, the QLogic SANbox2 performed with up to 96 percent less latency (the amount of delay added by a device) compared to all competitive switch products. The SANbox2 demonstrated minimal and predictable latency under peak traffic conditions, which is a key performance requirement for most storage applications such as OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing), database transactions and video streaming/authoring.

"The SmartBits performance analysis products from Spirent were an obvious choice to test our SANbox2 switch in a variety of traffic load scenarios," said Mike Knudsen, senior vice president, QLogic Network Storage Group. "SAN designers and administrators require consistent and predictable switching performance for nominal and peak traffic cases. This testing confirms that the SANbox2 switching architecture provides industry-leading performance at the lowest cost in the market."

Testing Details

In measuring throughput, all 16 ports of the SANbox2 were tested simultaneously in pairs and mesh traffic patterns using the SmartBits 6000B, FBC-3602A test modules, and SmartFabric application from Spirent. The theoretical maximum throughput was calculated by the Spirent tools for all frame sizes allowable by the Fibre Channel standard (60-2148 bytes), resulting in the switch aggregate of 3,362 Mbytes/sec for maximum size frames. A maximum latency of 0.5 microseconds was achieved across the full range of traffic load scenarios: 20 percent to 100 percent of the maximum traffic burst rate for 2GBit Fibre Channel. By comparison, under identical conditions the latency of other products reached 15 microseconds or more, which is equivalent to 30 times the worst case for SANbox2.

Powered by QLogic

QLogic technology powers SAN solutions from the world's leading storage vendors including Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Quantum, Sony, StorageTek and Sun. The industry depends on QLogic to simplify SANs with native Fibre Channel support designed into all major operating systems and to innovate new ways to network storage through new technologies like Virtual Interface (VI), Fibre Down and iSCSI.

About QLogic

QLogic Corporation, www.qlogic.com, simplifies the process of networking storage for OEMs, resellers and system integrators with the only end-to-end infrastructure in the industry, consisting of award-winning controller chips, host bus adapters, network switches and management software to move data from the storage device through the fabric to the server. QLogic designs and produces solutions based on all storage network technologies including SCSI, iSCSI, InfiniBand and Fibre Channel. A member of the S&P 500 Index, QLogic was recently ranked number 25 on Forbes' Best 200 Small Companies and number 20 on Fortune's 100 Fastest Growing Companies.

Contact: QLogic Corporation, Frank Calderoni, 949-389-6120, frank.calderoni@qlogic.com.