A day after introducing new adapters for HP ProLiant servers, QLogic added PCI Express 3.0 support for E5-2600/1600 v2 Xeon processors across its entire FlexSuite line. Formerly code-named Ivy Town, the new chips perform up to 50 percent faster than previous generation CPUs.

The PCIe 3.0 bus standard lets QLogic’s converged network adapters (CNAs) deliver twice as much bandwidth as the 2.0 release. This capacity increase benefits cloud deployments and I/O-intensive storage environments that utilize flash solutions for active data.

According to QLogic, the FlexSuite 8300 Series product family is the first in the industry to support simultaneous, multiprotocol traffic for E5-2600/1600 servers. Furthermore, the adapters are compatible with SR-IOV, a specification that can treat a single PCIe device as several physical PCIe devices. This feature allows multiple guest operating systems to access the same hardware without having to make a detour through the hypervisor.

“Intel has enabled the next generation of I/O performance in virtualized environments with the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 Product Family and its ability to fully exploit PCIe 3.0, while eliminating a number of I/O bottlenecks,” said Amit Vashi, the vice president of products, technology and planning at QLogic. “QLogic FlexSuite dual personality adapters are engineered to fully capitalize on this new Intel platform in Fibre Channel and 10Gb Ethernet environments by balancing the computational ability of the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600/1600 v2 Product Family with superior I/O scalability, yielding exceptional application performance.”

QLogic is doubling down on the Fibre Channel market as part of an organization-wide initiative to boost long term profitability. Interim CEO Jean Hu stated that the company is cutting back on R&D in an effort to reduce annual spending by $20 million.