Networking gear vendor QLogic extended the five-year warranty available with its Fibre Channel adapter to its 10Gb Ethernet adapters – specifically the QLogic-branded 3200 Series Intelligent Ethernet adapters and 8200 Series converged networking adapters (CANs). The company said this last part of the extended warranty is “unmatched in the industry.

“QLogic is able to offer a more extensive warranty than others because our adapters provide extremely high reliability,” said Amit Vashi, vice president of marketing, Host Solutions Group, QLogic. “While many of our competitors offer one-year, standard warranties for their Ethernet adapters, and an optional extension to three-years for additional fees, QLogic is protecting customers’ investments in our 10 GB Ethernet adapter portfolio for a full five years, free of charge.”

The extended warranty does add to what Vashi referred as “extremely high reliability” at least overall, and appeals to companies that are eager about reducing some of the risks involving the maintenance of their mission-critical hardware.

This latest announcement is a milestone for both the company and the industry.  The same can be said of the latest edition of the Top 500 Supercomputer List, which includes some statistics that provide a glimpse to the overall direction of the industry. Wikibon drew some conclusions regarding the leading trends in this field, and the overall position of QLogic.

InfiniBand still powers the overwhelming majority of supercomputers – 98 percent of clustered supercomputers and 38 percent of the ones with a MPP architecture. QLogic’s TrueScale solution is used by more than 10 percent of the Top 500 supercomputers worldwide, as of late November.

Earlier that month QLogic had another update. It teamed-up with Juniper Networks to certify the  8200 Series 10GbE CANs to run in QFabric environments, which is built on the concept of collapsing the layers of traditional datacenter networking.