QLogic, LSI, Seagate Contribute Storage Technology to Open Compute

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QLogic is contributing the QLogic QOE2562 to the Open Compute Project, making it the first Fibre Channel adapter for the project. (Photo: QLogic)

Leading technology providers are contributing storage technology to the Open Compute Project, which is holding its Open Compute Summit this week in San Jose, Calif.. Here's a roundup:

QLogic

QLogic, a leading provider of Fibre Channel adapters, today announced the industry’s first Fibre Channel adapter specifically designed for use in Open Compute Project (OCP) servers. The QLogic QOE2562 8Gb Fibre Channel mezzanine adapter brings optimal security, maximum performance and enterprise-class reliability and manageability to OCP data centers. QLogic Fibre Channel OCP adapters are available with the OCP Certified Quanta STRATOS S215-X1M2Z.

“We see an increasing number of customers with Fibre Channel infrastructure who want to adopt Open Compute hardware,” said Mike Yang, general manager, Quanta QCT.”The partnership with QLogic allows us to provide secure, reliable Fibre Channel solutions that reduce energy consumption and maximize data center efficiency with Open Compute. Quanta QCT already delivers the industry's best TCO for cloud service providers and enterprises adopting Open Compute, so this partnership is an ideal fit.”

“Investment banking, securities and financial service organizations are requiring scalable, high bandwidth, and low latency connectivity options for storage in OCP operations,” said Stu Miniman, principal research contributor, Wikibon. "As they evaluate OCP solutions, users looking for guaranteed and predictable latency from a proven data center network infrastructure now have the option of Fibre Channel for delivering performance and reliability for critical workloads.”

LSI

LSI Corporation is contributing two storage infrastructure reference designs to the Open Compute Project, the company said today.

“Open Compute is about the ability to scale computing infrastructure in the most efficient and economical way possible to achieve more work per dollar,” said Greg Huff, the Chief Technology Officer of LSI. “LSI storage solutions play an important role in the data center, and our technology can be found in every current contribution to the Open Compute Project. We’re excited to formally join the OCP and look forward to continued contributions to the community.”

LSI is contributing two storage infrastructure reference designs to the OCP. The first is a board design for a 12Gb/s SAS Open Vault storage enclosure. LSI is also contributing a design from its Nytro XP6200 series of a PCIe flash accelerator cards, which are purpose-built to meet the requirements of Open Compute and other hyperscale servers.

At the OCP Summit, LSI is demonstrating a proof-of-concept Open Compute “ready” Rack Scale Storage Architecture with Nebula, Inc., a leading enterprise private cloud.

Seagate

Two new development tools from Seagate Technology related to its Kinetic Open Storage platform have been accepted by the Open Compute Foundation, and will debut today at the OCP Summit.

“Seagate is committed to driving open source innovation and empowering an active ecosystem of system builders and software developers with the tools they need to deploy cutting-edge storage solutions and drive this truly revolutionary platform,” said Mark Re, Seagate’s chief technology officer. “A true game changer, the Kinetic Open Storage platform will provide this community with the ability to deliver innovative, first-of-their-kind, scale-out storage architectures at the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership.”

Building on its continued support of open source innovation, Seagate is making its Ethernet Drive interface specification and T-Card development adapter available to the Open Compute Project. Both Seagate Kinetic drive connector specifications will enable the OCP community to design, test, and deliver applications and system designs built upon the Kinetic Open Storage platform providing an easy, cost-effective path to object-based solution development at a reduced time to market.

“Seagate’s Kinetic technology has enabled us to further innovate on top of the Open Compute Project system design and allows us to increase storage density and reduce performance bottlenecks,” said Steve Ichinaga, senior vice president and general manager for Hyve Solutions. “This new open storage platform is another great example of the innovations arising from the Open Compute Project community allowing us to better address the needs of our scale-out storage cloud customers.”

Mellanox

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. is offering its 40GbE NIC as a proposed contribution to the Open Compute Project, the company said. The ConnectX-3 Pro OCP-based 40GbE NICs with RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and overlay network offloads offer optimized latency and performance for converged I/O infrastructures while maintaining extremely low system power consumption.

“Mellanox has played an important role in a number of OCP projects, including our new networking project,” said Frank Frankovsky, president and chairman of the Open Compute Project Foundation. “We’re pleased to see them propose the 40GbE OCP-based NIC as a contribution to OCP and look forward to collaborating with them further as we work to make open hardware a reality.”