QLogic Corp. (www.qlogic.com), a provider of Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), stackable switches and blade server switches demonstrated end-to-end support of its HBA virtualization technologies at the Fall Storage Networking World show in Orlando, Fla. on Oct. 31. The QLogic-organized demonstration consisted of a real world configuration of multiple Cisco MDS 9216 Fibre Channel switches, QLogic SANblade 2400 Series Fibre Channel HBAs and Veritas Cluster Server from Symantec, all supporting N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) and Virtual Fabric technology in a standard Linux environment.

"QLogic was the first to market with HBA support for virtual SAN (VSAN) technology, now a T11 standard used to deploy Virtual Fabrics," said Frank Berry, vice president of marketing, QLogic Corp. "Now we've combined Virtual Fabric technology with NPIV to create a more secure, manageable, and higher performance environment for virtual machines."

NPIV, supported by the Fibre Channel switch and HBA, allows a single HBA port to function as multiple logical ports, each with its own identity and world wide port name (WWPN). Similarly, both the Fibre Channel switch and HBA work in conjunction to offer Virtual Fabric technology, which provides the ability to create completely isolated network groups. Each network group has its own set of fabric services (i.e. name server, zone server, login server). Software applications and operating systems can leverage NPIV and Virtual Fabric technology by supporting the QLogic HBA virtualization application programming interface (API) to exchange NPIV and Virtual Fabric parameters. ENS