8-gig era officially begins

QLogic this week became the third vendor to claim it is the first to ship 8 Gbit/sg Fibre Channel equipment.

QLogic says its 8Gb PCI-Express HBAs and 8-gig switches are available as a Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit  and from QLogic distributors. Although other vendors claim to have 8-gig devices, QLogic marketing vice president Frank Berry said his rivals aren’t shipping those products yet. That’s news to Brocade and Emulex. IBM, Sun and NetApp have said they are offering Brocade’s 8-gig DCX Backbone director, and Emulex lists Ingram Micro and TechData among the distributors selling its 8-gig HBAs.

But QLogic is the first vendor to offer up a real live 8-gig user. Managed hosting services firm InteleNet Communications has been testing QLogic 8-gig HBAs and switches , and general manager Carlos Oliviera expects to be an early adopter. InteleNet provides storage, security, networking, data backup and disaster recovery services out of a 55,000 square foot data center located in Irvine, Calif., and a smaller data center in Denver.

Oliviera said 8-gig Fibre Channel gear will help InteleNet provide better service for its customers in several ways.

“Our machines are diskless,” Oliviera said. “We started testing 8-gig equipment to enhance the speed of data transfers. We have customers with a high demand for utilization; they need to open several applications on the same machines. They need high I/O.

“And we’re seeing a lot of demand for disaster recovery where they replicate content across different disk controllers over the SAN, and they want to get that done as fast as possible.”

Besides the performance boost, Oliviera said 8-gig lets him connect more actual and virtual servers to his storage and adds redundancy. He expects to add 8-gig to his production system by mid-year when InteleNet installs its next 50-server rack.

InteleNet is probably the exception at this point for seeing value in 8-gig. Not even the storage vendors expect customers to move to 8-gig as fast as they went from 2- to 4-gig a few years back. The 8-gig HBAs and switches will cost about 15 percent more than 4-gig gear at the start. And the 8-gig ecosystem will take longer to develop. No system vendors have disclosed plans for 8-gig systems yet, and hard drive vendors probably won’t ever develop 8-gig Fibre Channel drives.

But Oliviera said the more expensive 8-gig gear makes sense for him because it lets his company add revenue through new customers. “The return on investment is still very good,” he said. “One of things that pushed this is virtualization. Now we can sell a lot more serivces with the same resources, which gives us a better ROI.”