QLogic hits road with InfiniBand

Racing ahead: QLogic's vice president of sales EMEA, Franco Mezzullo, with the Mercedes Benz Silver Arrows

Storage vendor QLogic recently brought together a selection of partners at Mercedes Benz World in Brooklands, Surrey to highlight new business opportunities.

Keynote presentations covered all areas of the vendor’s portfolio including fibre channel, iSCSI, fibre channel over Ethernet (FCoE), storage area networks (SANs) and its InfiniBand high-performance computing (HPC) offering.
The vendor recently created a dedicated HPC team comprising six trained staff to push its InfiniBand portfolio.

InfiniBand is a switched fabric communications connection used in HPC. It includes quality of service and failover and is designed to be scalable.

QLogic’s HPC portfolio includes multi-protocol fabric directors, edge fabric switches, host channel adapters (HCA) and a software suite to install, operate and maintain high-performance interconnect fabric.
In addition, September saw QLogic announce InfiniBand switches and adapters for Microsoft HPC Server 2008. According to IDC, InfiniBand is expected to grow 40 per cent year on year.

Driving HPC business
Henrik Hansen, marketing director for EMEA at QLogic, said: “We play in the storage networking area and focus on how you link storage to storage. We will be looking at how to drive HPC and InfiniBand into SMEs through the recruitment of new partners.

“QLogic’s new HPC team will engage with partners to support them in driving contracts and closing contracts.”
Hansen also said the vendor will look at ways that it can develop programmes with individual partners and create targeted campaigns.
John Walsh, sales director for HPC EMEA at QLogic, said: “My position is a new one in a new team, created to drive HPC. I will focus on pre- and post-sales for partners as well as technical support.

“With HPC it is QLogic’s switches that put it all together ­ this ensures the supercomputer is fast with low latency.”
Walsh explained that if a network’s latency breaks a calculation that a supercomputer is running, then the calculation has to be started all over again.

With multiple channels of data being simultaneously received by the supercomputer, he said it is important for the switches to keep up with various data rates.

“In some industries calculations can take a very long time to complete. The oil industry has been known to wait weeks for results.”
Other markets identified by Walsh as investing in HPC were weather forecasting, finance, media, nuclear, cryptology, engineering and life sciences.

“These are growing areas because we live in a knowledge-based economy and end users like to see calculations,” he said.
Walsh added that clusters will become more popular as they enable customers to cope with a mass of cables. “Some supercomputers require thousands of servers connected together. That is a lot for a company to manage.”

Foot on the gas
James Ward, managing director of storage distributor Hammer, said: “There is a lot of value in events like the QLogic Mercedes day, as it highlights all the opportunities.

“Hammer is continuing to drive QLogic’s portfolio. We have just opened our Benelux offices, taken on two new employees in Belgium and eight new staff in the UK.”

Barry Griffiths, managing director of reseller NAS, said: “We are looking to partner with QLogic very soon. If customers do not yet know who we are then QLogic is a good name to drop.

“QLogic’s products are the plumbing to a solution. In a storage solution you need the right pipes. Storage on its own is like a Mercedes Benz with no road ­ a customer might have great storage, but without the connections it is useless.”
Dominic Watts, technology director of NAS, was also impressed by the vendor’s dedicated account management approach.

“Some vendors rely on their distributors too much, but QLogic likes to be involved and to know what is going on at all times.”
Brian Melville, partnership relationship manager at Signature QLogic partner VAR Fordway, said: “We have a good relationship with QLogic and it offers us a good amount of support.

“QLogic’s distributors offer excellent training. Fordway recently spent two days with them to get everyone up to speed on new developments.”