Demonstrating QLogic Ethernet
Performance Leadership
It's a very exciting time to be a member of the QLogic team. I'm referring to our recent
announcement of the new QLogic NetXtreme II Ethernet products acquired from Broadcom. We
moved rather quickly to demonstrate exactly what this means for QLogic customers and
partners.
QLogic and Dell recently participated in an interoperability and performance showcase hosted
by Ethernet Alliance that demonstrates how extreme performance, decades of industry
experience and cooperative design yield outstanding results. The Ethernet Alliance team
interconnected two Dell servers through Dell 10GbE and 40GbE switches. Each Dell server
contained two QLogic NetXtreme II 57810S dual-port 10GbE Converged Network Adapters
(CNAs).
John D'Ambrosia, Chairman at Ethernet Alliance described the goal of this demonstration as
follows: "With this demo, Ethernet Alliance showcased a converged LAN and SAN 10/40GE
data center fabric. Avago Technologies, Aquantia, Dell Networking, Dell Storage, Intel, Panduit
and QLogic came together to showcase a live data center demonstration showing an open

standard Ethernet-based solution where Ethernet Alliance members are demonstrating full
interoperability."
I thought this was a really impressive setup, using Dell QLogic NetXtreme II 10GbE CNAs to
demonstrate how a lossless iSCSI configuration could drive up to 40Gbps of iSCSI traffic in an
industry standard configuration. QLogic and Dell design and build technology with ease-of-use
and interoperability in mind. With the infrastructure up and running, we saw some very
impressive performance, not just in terms of throughput but also in terms of low CPU utilization.
The QLogic adapters did all of the network heavy lifting on the servers, as illustrated below.
The I/O generator achieved a staggering bandwidth rate of 1000 MB/s or 10Gbps line rate over
the entire network. Even more impressive is the CPU utilization of less than 1% with a large
block I/O workload of 256K reads.

This type of network efficiency is essential for today’s virtualized data centers. Every customer I
meet is either approaching maximum utilization of their servers or soon will be. This is why
QLogic Ethernet adapters are so critical to business success. Choosing the wrong adapter for

your specific networking needs could lead to the purchase of more server hardware. In many
cases existing hardware could be utilized more efficiently using the right QLogic Ethernet
adapter. Competing Ethernet solutions do not offload all of the networking protocols as
efficiently as the QLogic products, which serve to streamline administrative tasks through their
deep integration into Dell's embedded management framework.
Making the right choice for the "first hop" out of the server means saving money and increasing
productivity. We have many more exciting announcements coming that will demonstrate how
QLogic is continuing to compliment and improve upon the investments that our customers have
made in their networking infrastructure. QLogic products are designed to interoperate and
perform in extreme networking environments, just like yours! Be sure to check back soon for
more information on all the exciting, high-performance networking and storage solutions from
QLogic and Dell.
For More Information, please visit: Qlogic.com