In a major development for its storage area networking (SAN) business, Agere Systems announced that QLogic Corp. chose Agere as its system chip supplier for its new 4 Gigabits per second (Gbits/s) Fibre Channel (FC) application specific integrated circuit and host bus adapter (HBA) storage area networking (SAN) solutions.
The 4 Gbits/s HBA FC SANblade 2400 series is deployed as both PCI Express and PCI-X 1.0 / 2.0 host bus interface products. QLogic ranks first worldwide in revenues (43.7 percent) and ports shipped (48.1 percent, 1M ports) for FC HBA equipment.*
“QLogic selected Agere’s chip technology because of its expertise in successfully integrating high-speed SerDes (serializer/deserializer) interface technology,” said Roger Klein, vice president of marketing for QLogic Computer Systems Group. “By providing a highly integrated, high-channel-density, low- power, single-chip system-on-a-chip solution, Agere improved QLogic’s time-to- market, and reduced its total product development costs. QLogic’s close and collaborative relationship with Agere builds on our leadership in the growing Fibre Channel SAN market.”
“Agere’s business relationship with QLogic demonstrates our intense focus on the highly attractive SAN market,” said Samir Samhouri, vice president of Agere’s Enterprise and Networking Division. “Agere’s experience in integrating high-speed interface technology and advanced signal integrity technology made it possible for us to deliver high-performance system chips to QLogic the first time through the validation process. That saved QLogic money and time in getting their products to customers.”
The SANblade product line is designed for QLogic channel partners around the world to easily migrate large, high-end businesses, and small and medium businesses (SMBs) from direct-attached storage technology to SANs. QLogic SANblade HBAs are popular with equipment manufacturers, channel customers and end users, because they feature broad operating system support and extremely high reliability, making them easy to install and manage.
Agere, a leader in providing SoCs for storage applications, has one of the industry’s broadest portfolios of SerDes high-speed interface technology. Agere’s interface portfolio supports speeds from 155 megabits per second (Mbits/s) to 10 Gbits/s and offers unparalleled integration into SoCs compliant with standards.
Such standards include 1, 2, 4 Gigabit Fibre Channel; 1.5 and 3 Gbits/s SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) and Serial Attached SCSI
(Small Computer System Interface), Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI), PCI-X, PCI-X 2.0, PCI Express, SPI-3/4/5, SFI-4 (SerDes Framer Interface), serial RapidIO and XAUI (10 Gigabit Attachment Unit Interface). Agere is a leader in development of 8 Gbits/s FC SerDes in anticipation of the standards approval.
