Networking equipment supplier QLogic  revealed this morning that its 8200 and 3200 Series10Gb CNAs have been certified as being fully compatible with the Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch line-up. This switch family is an integral part of Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Fluent Network architecture, the firm’s means of competing in an increasingly virtualized networking market.

“Today’s applications require data center solutions that deliver new levels of performance, scalability and flexibility,” said Amit Vashi, vice president of marketing, Host Solutions Group, QLogic. “QLogic adapters excel in dense computing and high-performance virtualized environments and deliver advanced virtualization services that make them highly suitable for Alcatel-Lucent deployments.”

Enterprise environments today have to accommodate massive increases in traffic due to trends such as big and BYOD.  AFN offers clients the tools to address these points while also reducing complexity in the network, and QLogic’s adapters supplement this approach rather nicely.  The company’s solutions come equipped with parallel capabilities and a patented technology called NIC Partitioning, which can split a control into several virtual, easily managed ports.

In the past few months QLogic has expanded its product line in a few key directions. Earlier this month it unveiled the QLE3242-R, a 10GbE adapter built for users who are their data centers. The QLE is fully interoperable with one gigabyte twisted pair solutions, which makes it much easier to deploy in existing environments.

The product belongs to the 3200 adapter portfolio and, in addition to backward computability, offers more range and less latency than certain alternatives.

QLogic is trying to stay ahead of the curve, and right now, the bleeding edge technology is flash. One of the company’s newest projects is Mt. Rainier, a card that makes SSDs tucked away inside servers available across the SAN. This flash caching capability can improve performance and network agility by a great deal, experts say.