"We will support other interfaces, but those are through bridge chips," he says. "This is an opportunity for the HBA vendors [to] directly attach to the memory controller. This will provide both cost and performance advantages."
Frank Berry, QLogics VP of marketing, says the primary benefit is that PCI Express offers a roadmap that allows HBAs to keep pace with other technologies. "All of the server vendors are going to be doing servers with PCI Express slots," he says. "Were connecting them with Fibre Channel storage."
Berry says that QLogics new SANblade PCI Express HBAs are available now for OEMs to integrate into their products and will probably be commercially available early next year when the major server vendors start releasing their PCI Express servers. They will cost about the same as the companys existing PCI-based HBAs, he says, but as the industry moves to 4- and 10-Gbit/s speeds, they will offer significant improvements in performance.
Thats when well realize the full performance [advantage], he says, adding that QLogic is planning on rolling out both 4- and 10-Gbit/s HBAs early next year.
Emulex, meanwhile, announced its own PCI Express version of its LightPulse 2-Gbit/s LP10000 family. The new LP10000Ex, which is also expected to start shipping early next year, is designed for use with PCI Express-based servers, and is software compatible with existing PCI and PCI-X systems, Emulex states in its press release. The new HBA is based on the companys Thor ASIC and offers more than 100,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) and 790 Mbyte/s throughput across two ports.
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