Product Brief
Marvell® QLogic® QLE2690/2692
Single-port and Dual-port Enhanced 16GFC Fibre Channel Adapters
The Marvell QLogic QLE2690 single-port and QLE2692 dual-port Enhanced 16Gb FC (16GFC) HBAs boast industry-leading native FC performance with extremely low CPU usage and full hardware offloads.
Enhanced 16GFC
Compared to 16GFC, the Marvell QLogic Enhanced 16GFC solution offers higher
per-port performance (up to 650K IOPS) with low power consumption. In addition, Marvell StorFusion technology delivers streamlined provisioning, QoS, and improved resiliency while addressing the needs of IT organizations that require reliability, inte- grated management, and guaranteed network performance.
Enhanced 16GFC technology resolves data center complexities by enabling a storage network infrastructure that supports powerful virtualization features, applica-
tion-aware services, and simplified management. The QLE2690/2692 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-flash 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 QLE2690/2692 Adapters can accelerate mission-critical enterprise applications by delivering up to 1.3 million IOPS for physical, virtual, and private cloud environments.
Marvell QLogic adapters deliver the best storage application performance in virtualized and non-virtualized environments with support for up to 6,400MBps of aggregate
throughput.
NVMe® Over Fibre Channel (FC-NVME)
The QLE2690/2692 Adapters support the FC-NVMe-2 (NVMe over Fibre Channel)
protocol. The QLE2690/2692 Adapters can simultaneously support FC-NVMe and
FCP-SCSI storage traffic. 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 Series Enhanced 16GFC 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.
Virtualization Optimized
The QLE2690/2692 Adapters support standards-based virtualization features. Under
VMware® ESXi 6.x and later, 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. In addition, the 16GFC line rate per physical port delivers unmatched storage performance to maximize the number of VMs per physical server.
Marvell StorFusion Technology
Marvell QLogic Enhanced 16GFC Adapters, powered by StorFusion technology, include advanced capabilities that are enabled when deployed with supported Brocade® and
Cisco® switches. By combining these industry-leading solutions, SAN administrators can take advantage of enhanced features that improve availability, accelerate deployment, and increase network performance.
Marvell Universal SAN Congestion Mitigation Technology (USCM)
SAN congestion, although rare, has the potential to quickly spread and significantly
disrupt application performance leading to lost business. Modern SANs, specifically
those with flash storage and mix of Fibre Channel endpoint speeds can be prone to
congestion. SAN Congestion typically occurs when slower FC endpoints cannot accept responses generated by flash/NVMe storage, a condition referred to as oversubscrip- tion/over-utilization. Rarely, a misbehaving FC device can also lead to SAN congestion when it is unable to replenish credits which are key to reliable Fibre Channel transmis- sions, a condition referred to as slow-drain. SAN congestion when timely detected, can be isolated and decisive actions applied. A Fibre Channel standard, Fabric Performance Impact Notifications (FPINs) bring congestion awareness to FC endpoints.
Utilizing FPINs, Marvell’s QLogic 2690 Series Adapters implement Universal SAN
Congestion Mitigation Technology (USCM). USCM uniquely works both Brocade and
Cisco SAN fabrics to keep applications running at peak performance by providing an
in-band and zero touch SAN congestion detection, notification, and avoidance system. QLogic 2690 Series HBAs interact with Cisco and Brocade SANs using both the more
reliable FC primitive signaling as well as protocol events to bring awareness of the
presence of congestion, peer congestion, link integrity, lost frames etc. QLogic 2690
Series HBAs also have the ability to enable decisive actions such as fine-grained I/O
throttling, automatic path failover, load balancing, and flow quarantining to ensure that SAN congestion is mitigated with minimum impact to application performance.
Marvell QLogic USCM technology, offered at no additional cost, brings strong awareness of SAN congestion and implements decisive actions to prevent application degradation. It is highly recommended for modern SANs.
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 QLE2690/2692 Adapters support link cable beacon (LCB), which enables adminis- trators 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.
Marvell 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 the fabric-as-
signed port worldwide 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 QoS
Network performance can be dramatically improved by implementing the indus-
try-standard class-specific control (CS_CTL)-based frame prioritization QoS, which helps alleviate network congestion. When Marvell QLogic adapters with StorFusion technol- ogy are connected to supported SAN fabrics, traffic is classified as it arrives at the
switch, and is then processed on the basis of configured priorities. Traffic can be
prioritized for delivery or subjected to limited delivery options. As a result, mission-criti- cal workloads can be assigned a higher priority than less time-sensitive network traffic 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 fiber connections.