Synology Marvell QLogic QLE2692 Dual-Port PCIe 3.0 x8 16Gbps Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter

The Marvell QLogic QLE2692 dual-port Enhanced 16Gb FC (16GFC) HBAs boast industry-leading native FC performance with extremely low CPU usage and full hardware offloads.

Enhanced 16GFC
Compared to 16GFC, the Marvell QLogic Enhanced 16GFC solution offers higher per-port performance (up to 650K IOPS) with low power consumption. In addition, Marvell StorFusion technology delivers streamlined provisioning, QoS, and improved resiliency while addressing the needs of IT organizations that require reliability, integrated management, and guaranteed network performance. Enhanced 16GFC technology resolves data center complexities by enabling a storage network infrastructure that supports powerful virtualization features, application-aware services, and simplified management. The QLE2692 Adapter provide advanced storage networking features capable of supporting the most demanding virtualized and private cloud environments, while fully leveraging the capabilities of high-performance 16GFC and all-flash arrays (AFAs). Powerful management tools automate and simplify SAN provisioning to help reduce cost and complexity, while the unmatched 16GFC performance eliminates potential I/O bottlenecks in today's powerful multiprocessor, multicore servers.

Superior Performance
The QLE2692 Adapter can accelerate mission-critical enterprise applications by delivering up to 1.3 million IOPS for physical, virtual, and private cloud environments. Marvell QLogic Adapter deliver the best storage application performance in virtualized and non-virtualized environments with support for up to 6,400MBps of aggregate throughput.

NVMe Over Fibre Channel (FC-NVME)
The QLE2692 Adapter support the FC-NVMe-2 (NVMe over Fibre Channel) protocol. The QLE2692 Adapter can simultaneously support FC-NVMe and FCP-SCSI storage traffic. NVMe storage offers exceptionally high performance at very low latencies. NVMe works best with a network that can provide lossless, low-latency, and high-performing transport. The 2600 Series Enhanced 16GFC Adapter bring the best of both worlds by offering the highest performance and lowest latency access to NVMe and SCSI storage over an FC network.

Virtualization Optimized
The QLE2692 Adapter support standards-based virtualization features. Under VMware ESXi 6.x and later, I/O requests and responses can be tagged with the virtual machine-ID (VM-ID) of the appropriate virtual machine, providing end-to-end visibility at the VM level. Support for N_Port ID virtualization (NPIV) enables a single FC adapter port to provide multiple virtual ports for increased network scalability. In addition, the 16GFC line rate per physical port delivers unmatched storage performance to maximize the number of VMs per physical server.

Marvell StorFusion Technology
Marvell QLogic Enhanced 16GFC Adapters, powered by StorFusion technology, include advanced capabilities that are enabled when deployed with supported Brocade and Cisco switches. By combining these industry-leading solutions, SAN administrators can take advantage of enhanced features that improve availability, accelerate deployment, and increase network performance.

Marvell Universal SAN Congestion Mitigation Technology (USCM)
SAN congestion, although rare, has the potential to quickly spread and significantly disrupt application performance leading to lost business. Modern SANs, specifically those with flash storage and mix of Fibre Channel endpoint speeds can be prone to congestion. SAN Congestion typically occurs when slower FC endpoints cannot accept responses generated by flash/NVMe storage, a condition referred to as oversubscription/over-utilization. Rarely, a misbehaving FC device can also lead to SAN congestion when it is unable to replenish credits which are key to reliable Fibre Channel transmissions, a condition referred to as slow-drain. SAN congestion when timely detected, can be isolated and decisive actions applied. A Fibre Channel standard, Fabric Performance Impact Notifications (FPINs) bring congestion awareness to FC endpoints.

Utilizing FPINs, Marvell's QLogic 2690 Series Adapter implement Universal SAN Congestion Mitigation Technology (USCM). USCM uniquely works both Brocade and Cisco SAN fabrics to keep applications running at peak performance by providing an in-band and zero touch SAN congestion detection, notification, and avoidance system. QLogic 2690 Series HBAs interact with Cisco and Brocade SANs using both the more reliable FC primitive signaling as well as protocol events to bring awareness of the presence of congestion, peer congestion, link integrity, lost frames etc. QLogic 2690 Series HBAs also have the ability to enable decisive actions such as fine-grained I/O throttling, automatic path failover, load balancing, and flow quarantining to ensure that SAN congestion is mitigated with minimum impact to application performance.

Marvell QLogic USCM technology, offered at no additional cost, brings strong awareness of SAN congestion and implements decisive actions to prevent application degradation. It is highly recommended for modern SANs.

Improved Total Cost of Ownership and Reliability
StorFusion technology delivers advanced link diagnostics, which improve availability and support for high-performance fabrics. Using the Diagnostics Port feature with a Brocade switch that supports ClearLink, administrators can quickly run a battery of automated diagnostic tests to assess the health of links and fabric components.

The QLE2692 Adapter support link cable beacon (LCB), which enables administrators to visually identify both ends of a physical link. In a large data center with hundreds of ports and cables to manage, a simple command turns on port LED beacons on both ends of a link cable connection. Administrators can use LCB to quickly identify connection peer ports without tracing the cable.

Marvell technology includes the read diagnostic parameters (RDP) feature, which provides detailed port, media, and optics diagnostics. From any point in the fabric, an administrator can use RDP to easily discover and diagnose link-related errors and degrading conditions on any N_Port-to-F_Port link.

The extensive suite of diagnostic tools maximizes uptime and performance, allowing organizations to address problems before they impact operations.

Rapid Server Deployment and Orchestration
StorFusion technology includes fabric pre-provisioning services that enable servers to be quickly deployed, replaced, and moved across the SAN. By leveraging the fabric-assigned port world wide name (FA-WWN) and fabric-based boot LUN discovery (F-BLD) capabilities, the creation of zones, LUNs, and other services can be completed before the servers arrive on site-eliminating time consuming, manual tasks that typically delay server deployment.

Performance SLA Enforcement with VM-level QoS
Network performance can be dramatically improved by implementing the industry-standard class-specific control (CS_CTL)-based frame prioritization QoS, which helps alleviate network congestion. When Marvell QLogic Adapter with StorFusion technology are connected to supported SAN fabrics, traffic is classified as it arrives at the switch, and is then processed on the basis of configured priorities. Traffic can be prioritized for delivery or subjected to limited delivery options. As a result, mission-critical workloads can be assigned a higher priority than less time-sensitive network traffic to achieve optimized performance.

Higher Resiliency and Performance with Automatic Error Recovery
Forward error correction (FEC) improves performance and link integrity to support higher end-to-end data rates by automatically recovering from many transmission errors without re-sending the frames. FEC automatically detects and recovers from bit errors, which results in higher availability and performance.

Automatic buffer-to-buffer credit recovery (BB-CR) helps overcome performance degradation, congestion, and link resets caused by buffer credit loss, especially on longer distance and high-loss fiber connections.

Simplified Management
The Marvell unified management application, QConvergeConsole (QCC), provides single-pane-of-glass management across generations of Marvell QLogic FC adapters. In addition, Marvell supports all major APIs for deployment flexibility and integration with third-party management tools, including the VMware vCenter and Brocade Network Advisor.

High Availability and Reliability
Marvell QLogic Enhanced 16GFC Adapter continue the tradition of complete port-level isolation across the FC controller architecture. This architecture, unlike other vendor solutions, provides independent function, transmit and receive buffers, an on-chip CPU, DMA channels, and a firmware image for each port. These features enable complete port-level isolation, prevent errors and firmware crashes from propagating across all ports, and provide predictable and scalable performance across all ports. The Marvell architecture delivers ultimate reliability to meet the needs of mission-critical enterprise applications with lower power and fewer CPU cycles, all while maintaining peak performance.

In addition, overlapping protection domains (OPDs) ensure the highest level of reliability as data moves to and from the PCI bus and FC network.

The QLE2692 Adapter also provide end-to-end data integrity with support for T10 Performance Information (T10 PI), which prevents the risk of silent data corruption in environments running Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.