The OpenStack cloud platform has been boosted again with the news that Qlogic's suite of converged network adapters (CNAs), Fibre Channel adapters and intelligent network interface cards (NICs) have been made compatible.
For networking connectivity under Neutron, QLogic will be offering Ethernet solutions that support a list of virtualisation and multi-tenant services for enterprise data centres, as well as private, public, and hybrid cloud deployments. These include:
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NIC Partitioning, which exposes virtual, configurable NICs to applications running in bare-metal, as well as hypervisor environments, enabling application and virtual machine (VM) level SLAs.
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Multi-Queue receive capability that enables CPU load balancing for improved performance
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Single Root I/O Virtualisation (SR-IOV) to enforce VM-level traffic isolation
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Tunnelling offloads such as Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) enable multi-tenant network scalability and security
Commonly deployed as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution, the OpenStack open-source cloud operating system controls increasing pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a data centre.
QLogic solutions interoperate with the OpenStack cloud operating system for networking as well as block, file and object storage. They are compatible with OpenStack Neutron, Cinder and Swift services for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) applications, it says, and support OpenStack I/O services across Ethernet and Fibre Channel products.
For storage connectivity, QLogic Ethernet CNAs and Fibre Channel adapters support fully offloaded iSCSI and Fibre Channel transports to support workload service-level agreements for performance-sensitive applications, with “minimal consumption” of processing resources. The core networking and storage services provided by QLogic products enable OpenStack users to focus on building scalable applications and services with a robust underlying infrastructure, it says.
“OpenStack technology provides a flexible, cloud-based platform for a range of applications including high performance computing, big data and IaaS,” said Vikram Karvat, vice president of products, marketing and planning, QLogic. “As a Supporting Organization member of the OpenStack Foundation, QLogic looks forward to providing a comprehensive, robust portfolio of I/O solutions that support this open platform to empower users with the greatest possible performance and efficiency.”