IBM's 8 Gb Fibre Channel for blades

From The Register again, news of IBM’s new 8 Gb Fibre Channel solution, based on QLogic’s daughter card

IBM logoIBM is making the rounds this week talking up a new 8 Gb Fibre Channel daughter cards for its BladeCenter blade servers, saying that it is the only blade maker that can deliver 8 Gb performance all the way out to the storage area network.

…IBM has been selling a different QLogic adapter, which puts two 4 Gb Fibre Channel ports and a Gigabit Ethernet port on the same card, for the past several months, but the new QLogic card and the inherent bandwidth in the backplane of the BladeCenter H and HT chassis is allowing IBM actually get 8 Gb FC performance end-to-end.

As the article notes, HP cannot currently support 8 Gb end-to-end, but is likely to in the near future. Dell claims that it has been shipping end-to-end 8 Gb capable solutions for its M Series blades since December.

Comments

  1. Surprising that IBM made no mention of Dell in the article, seeing as IBM was 3 months later in its end-to-end FC8 blade solution. Glad to see the author added a note to his article to reflect this.