QLE10000: caching in a Fibre Channel adapter

QLogic has released an interesting 8Gb FC adapter, the QLE10000, which uses a shared cache (models with 200 and 400 GB of flash). The nodes of the "shared cache" talk to each other over the SAN.

The SAN speed-up is most noticeable for clustered and virtualised applications such as Oracle RAC and IBM pureScale (from 7× with one server to 22× with four) and is not noticeable at all for bulk data transfers.

Since no hardware or software changes are needed, for a certain class of software you can raise performance substantially just by swapping the FC cards in your servers.

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Originally published in Russian on LiveJournal.