When intelligence agencies monitor chatter, they don’t examine the content details of communications intercepts as much as the volume.

1. Why QLogic 10Gb Ethernet
Matters to Lenovo Customers
When intelligence agencies monitor chatter, they don’t examine the content
details of communications intercepts as much as the volume. They pay attention
to fluctuations and spikes in the number of messages sent and received over
certain networks on certain themes.
Now, I’m not pretending to be as accurate as a data miner or analytics program,
but I’ve noticed that the volume spikes in the amount of chatter on 10Gb
Ethernet (10GbE) has been steadily growing over the last year. It comes from real
conversations I’ve had with Lenovo sellers and end users at a multitude of
meeting places, such as Lenovo sales kick-off event and Lenovo Enterprise
Briefing Center (EBC), as well as industry events such as VMworld® and Red Hat
Summit.
The time for 10GbE is now! It may have had a slow start, but it is more relevant
today than at any point in its seven-year history. Take a look at this chart from

2. Crehan Research[1] below. The steepest point in the 10GbE adoption exploded
within the last year and will continue for a handful of more years to come.
And although the rumbling of 25GbE (and higher) is just beginning, those
ecosystems will take a while to catch up to the mature position currently claimed
by 10GbE technology and its providers.
Within this proven ecosystem is QLogic, with its 10GbE adapters and CNAs that
have been excelling in modern Lenovo rack/tower and flex system environments.
If you are part of the growing 10GbE chatter, I applaud your efforts to bring your
Lenovo data center up to the next generation of higher Ethernet performance. If

3. you are still on the fence, let me throw a few considerations and resources your
way. I think you’ll begin to understand why 10GbE has become the solution of
choice for virtualized, workload-intensive computing environments, how relevant
it is in reducing TCO and why it matters more than ever to Lenovo enterprise data
center customers today.
Top Three Reasons Why QLogic 10GbE Matters to Lenovo Customers
1. Performance is maximized with NIC Partitioning (NPAR): NPAR helps make
the migration to today’s powerful 10GbE networks an easy and compelling
option. With optimized I/O and server resource utilization, performance
and efficiency is maximized while TCO is reduced. NPAR allows a single
10GbE port to be partitioned into multiple physical functions, each with its
own configurations including bandwidth settings. This is particularly helpful
in virtualization where you typically want to isolate different hypervisor
functions onto a separate 1Gb port.
With QLogic’s NPAR capabilities, the number of adapters required is reduced
because you can leverage a single port for multiple functions. When you allocate
bandwidth, you can ensure QoS so that a particular application is guaranteed a
defined bandwidth. From a TCO and management perspective, there is a huge
savings to the IT department, a huge performance improvement and QoS
guarantee available to the customer.[2]
2. Applications are accelerated with tunneling offload: Tunneling offloads are
a powerful solution to the problem of vLAN-sprawl. As IT runs out of vLANs,
the only other choice is to move to tunneling based on VXLAN, NVGRE or
GENEVE in order to segregate individual workloads. QLogic adapters have
the ability to do standard offloads even when transporting these overlays,
and expand vLANs from 4096 to 16 million[3]. Tunneling offload can
increase data throughput up to 18 percent[4] and increase CPU efficiency
up to 55 percent[5], impacting TCO by improving application performance
and reducing the number of servers required to support the same
workloads.

4. Learn more about the benefits of tunneling offloads in this ESG Lab Review:
Accelerating Network Virtualization Overlays with QLogic Intelligent
Ethernet Adapters
Hear more about offloads in this Lenovo Press Talk video: QLogic Adapters
and Lenovo Rack-Optimized Servers
3. CPU efficiency gets a boost with storage offloads and converged Ethernet:
The 10X increase in bandwidth provided by 10GbE networks can also be
used to support protocols for SANs. QLogic converged Ethernet adapters
for Lenovo optimize server utilization with full hardware offload for iSCSI
and FCoE protocols. By comparison, most other 10GbE adapters require
iSCSI and FCoE software initiators that squander critical CPU resources for
storage I/O. By offloading the storage burden to the adapter’s hardware,
the host’s processor isn’t as heavily taxed. By consuming less processor
resources, you have room for more VMs and can accelerate applications.
QLogic converged adapters give your Lenovo data center the performance,
reliability and scalability required to reduce your overall footprint and
improve your TCO.
Read more about storage offloads in this Lenovo blog: Before You Lock and
Load Your Data Center, Make Sure You Know the Truth About Offloads
Hear more about the added value of convergence from QLogic and Lenovo
in this video: The Benefits of Converged Networking with QLogic and
Lenovo Flex System
I realize this is a lot of information to download, read, watch and digest. But when
you’re done, I hope to run into you at the next Lenovo-QLogic event and hear
your thoughts. Or, you can follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn and let all of us know.
My bet is you’ll be joining in on the 10GbE chatter very soon and singing its
praises loud and clear.
For more information, please visit: Qlogic.com