QLogic and Brocade Collaborate to Advance Fibre Channel SAN Fabric Connectivity

New Functionality for QLogic Adapters Reduces Operational Costs and Improves Availability and Performance Across Brocade Fibre Channel SANs


ALISO VIEJO, Calif., Oct. 14, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC), the market leader in Fibre Channel adapters, today announced a new set of industry-leading features for their award-winning QLogic® 16Gb Gen 5 Fibre Channel adapters, which are the first co-development efforts to be released from the QLogic / Brocade technology alliance announced in January 2014. QLogic and Brocade, the leaders in Fibre Channel SAN fabrics, have joined forces to help data center managers extend the power of their Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs) as part of a shared commitment to enhance end-to-end storage connectivity.

The new QLogic suite of end-to-end features enables data center managers to reduce operating expenses and total cost of ownership by accelerating deployment, increasing performance and simplifying management of Gen 5 Fibre Channel SANs featuring Brocade Fabric Vision technology and QLogic 2600 Series adapters.

"To meet the growing business demands created by advanced computing environments, enterprise IT is embracing highly virtualized and cloud-based architectures, which increase demands on Fibre Channel SAN fabrics," said Tony Carrozza, senior vice president of worldwide sales, QLogic. "Our collaboration with Brocade offers greater value and enables a smooth transition to virtualized network storage. Organizations can leverage these advanced features to achieve maximum results from the industry's most widely deployed Fibre Channel storage network infrastructures built on QLogic adapters and Brocade Fabric Vision technology."

QLogic's new end-to-end enhancements include Brocade ClearLink support, a key Brocade Fabric Vision technology that simplifies deployment and support for high performance fabrics. ClearLink allows storage administrators to run a battery of automated diagnostic tests to assess the health of links or identify issues prior to deployment. By proactively verifying the integrity of critical transceivers, organizations can save time and increase network availability by quickly addressing any physical layer issues without the need for special optical testers.

Another co-developed enhancement for QLogic adapters is QoS, which improves network performance and prevents network congestion by prioritizing the use of bandwidth from the fabric to the host. With QoS, traffic is classified as it arrives at the switch, and then processed on the basis of configured priorities. Traffic can be dropped, prioritized for delivery or subjected to limited delivery options.

Available with QLogic's next software release in November, QLogic's new suite of end-to-end features are fully integrated with QLogic management tools, including the QConvergeConsole GUI, CLI and VMware vCenter plug-in.

"Over the past year QLogic and Brocade have worked closely to bring to market a compelling set of features that work seamlessly across QLogic adapters and Brocade switches," said Jack Rondoni, vice president, storage networking, at Brocade. "These new features are designed to provide greater value by optimizing SAN manageability and performance in highly scalable, virtualized data centers. We look forward to co-developing additional features for QLogic adapters that leverage Brocade Fabric Vision to further enhance the robustness of our mutual customers' SAN infrastructures and to demonstrate why Fibre Channel will continue to be the technology of choice for the world's most demanding workloads."

Market Leaders in Fibre Channel Infrastructure Join Forces

QLogic is the vendor of choice among IT professionals looking for optimum performance, scalability and efficiency while tackling ever-growing enterprise workloads. QLogic award-winning 16Gb Gen 5 Fibre Channel adapters have been recognized by IT professionals as the Market Leader in Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) five consecutive years in IT Brand Pulse brand preference surveys, and Storage Magazine named QLogic FlexSuite Product of the Year for 2012. QLogic has held the market share leadership position in Fibre Channel adapters for more than 10 consecutive years with solutions designed to support the increased scalability and I/O capacity demands created by advanced computing environments.

Brocade leads the industry in providing comprehensive network solutions that help the world's leading organizations transition smoothly to a virtualized world where applications and information reside anywhere. As a result, Brocade facilitates strategic business objectives such as consolidation, network convergence, virtualization, and cloud computing. Today, Brocade solutions are used in over 90 percent of Global 1000 data centers as well as in enterprise LANs and the largest service provider networks.

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QLogic – the Ultimate in Performance

QLogic (Nasdaq:QLGC) is a global leader and technology innovator in high performance server and storage networking connectivity products. Leading OEMs and channel partners worldwide rely on QLogic for their server and storage networking solutions. For more information, visit www.qlogic.com.

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This press release contains statements relating to future results of the company (including certain beliefs and projections regarding business and market trends) that are "forward-looking statements" as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied in the forward-looking statements. The company advises readers that these potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: potential fluctuations in operating results; gross margins that may vary over time; unfavorable economic conditions; the stock price of the company may be volatile; the company's dependence on the networking markets served; the ability to maintain and gain market or industry acceptance of the company's products; the company's dependence on a small number of customers; the company's ability to compete effectively with other companies; uncertain benefits from strategic business combinations, acquisitions and divestitures; the ability to attract and retain key personnel; the complexity of the company's products; declining average unit sales prices of comparable products; the company's dependence on sole source and limited source suppliers; the company's dependence on relationships with certain third-party subcontractors and contract manufacturers; sales fluctuations arising from customer transitions to new products; seasonal fluctuations and uneven sales patterns in orders from customers; changes in the company's tax provisions or adverse outcomes resulting from examination of its income tax returns; international economic, currency, regulatory, political and other risks; facilities of the company and its suppliers and customers are located in areas subject to natural disasters; the ability to protect proprietary rights; the ability to satisfactorily resolve any infringement claims; a reduction in sales efforts by current distributors; declines in the market value of the company's marketable securities; changes in and compliance with regulations; difficulties in transitioning to smaller geometry process technologies; the use of "open source" software in the company's products; system security risks, data protection breaches and cyber-attacks; and the company's ability to borrow under its credit agreement is subject to certain covenants.

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