QLogic, a leader in the new converged data center, is on a roll with performance leadership ,and now with more design wins. Today, QLogic is announcing a deal with Avaya to team up with the new converged switch on a chip called the “Bullet”.

The QLogic Bullet—a converged networking switch-on-a-chip, continues to shatter through competitive barriers and take the company into new expansion markets as it’s FCoE switching technology becomes increasingly popular within the Ethernet switching community.

When it comes to winning key design wins for converged network switching, specifically 10GbE FCoE, QLogic has been on something of a rampage over the past few months. Consider that in the past 120 days QLogic has racked up design wins for HP’s Virtual Connect Flex Fabric module, HP’s A5820 Data Center-class Ethernet switch and today unveiled that it will be providing a 10GbE FCoE 8-Port Converged Network Switching module to Avaya, a $5B telecommunications colossus that will use the module to beef up its Ethernet switching capabilities for virtualized cloud computing environments.

As we’ve predicted before, the vendor-neutral position of QLogic is continuing to open up significant OEM opportunities for the company in the converged network switching space. What with Brocade competing with Ethernet switch vendors more intensively than ever, and Cisco an established adversary of the Ethernet switch community, who else are Ethernet switch companies going to call for that oh-so-critical-piece of FCoE IP?

Today’s announcement also opens up an interesting competitive dynamic in that both Avaya and HP Ethernet switch customers will now be able to switch protocol support on the fly—supporting iSCSI, FCoE, FC or 10GbE as and when the business requires—using the Bullet ASIC while customers of Brocade or Cisco Ethernet switches must continue to purchase individual, dedicated, standalone switches for each and every separate network protocol.

Here are some highlights from the Avaya and QLogic press releases

Avaya, a global leader in enterprise communications systems, software and services, today launched a new data networking architecture that helps enterprises reap the benefits of virtualization in a more simplified and cost-effective manner. This technology utilizes a new, end-to-end enterprise-wide architecture designed to help CIOs and IT departments meet the surging demand for new content and business collaboration applications.

Avaya Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (Avaya VENA) allows organizations to more easily optimize business applications and service deployments in and between data centers and campuses. Avaya VENA helps reduce costs and can significantly improve time to service by more efficiently optimizing the network connections between application servers and end users – essentially providing an end-to-end connection from the desktop all the way to the data center. It can also reduce risks for CIOs by simplifying provisioning and policy configurations, reducing network re-designs, and providing new, streamlined tools for network management.

Specifically, QLogic plans to introduce a new 8-Port Converged Network Switching Module that simplifies networking by adding Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) capabilities to provide access for virtual and physical servers to Ethernet LANs and Fibre Channel SANs over a single, high-speed 10GbE data pipe. These enhanced capabilities make the combined Avaya-QLogic solution ideally suited for cloud computing environments, virtualized data centers and the converged enterprise.

Based on the breakthrough QLogic “Bullet” FCoE switching ASIC, the solution features QLogic’s industry-first, protocol-agnostic flex port technology that enables any port to be dynamically allocated to support Fibre Channel, 10Gb Ethernet, iSCSI or FCoE data. As a key enabler of QLogic’s Adaptive Convergence strategy, QLogic flex port technology provides variable connectivity options and complete flexibility, enabling customer-paced network convergence, and removes all guess work around the selection of port types and ratios. With flex ports that can shift protocol support on-the-fly, today’s announcement signals another leap forward for Avaya and QLogic in intelligent switching technology and network convergence.

New Generation of Data Center Technologies – Convergence is the story

Think about it. We are talking about a fundamental game-changing technology play here. This is analogous to the iPhone enabling you surf the Web, shoot HD video and engage in real-time video chat versus having to carry a camera, PC and multiple other contraptions to try and achieve the same effect.

We are talking about massive savings in data center space and energy consumption.  We are talking about the consolidation of the datacenter and multi-protocol on one board, moving towards a common, unified switching fabric that can support all protocols, all networks on demand. We are talking about buying an Ethernet switch and running native Fibre Channel or native iSCSI on-the-fly. We are talking about replacing multiple rows of single purpose Ethernet switches with multi-functional, multi-dimensional Bullet-enabled Ethernet switches.

The bottom line is that QLogic Bullet technology fundamentally unifies a massive array of switch offerings into one core nucleus of data center connectivity.

SiliconAngle attended QLogic’s recent investor conference in New York, and believes that additional Ethernet switching vendors are evaluating the Bullet technology or are already undergoing intensive evaluations in their test labs. Brocade should clearly be alarmed by the competitive inroads that QLogic is making in the converged networking space.

Today’s announcement fuses together Avaya’s new Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture strategy with QLogic’s Adaptive Convergence strategy and the results look promising for customers in flexibility-intensive cloud computing environments.

We’re eager to see who’s next to take the Bullet as QLogic continues its’ streak of design wins.

In related news theCube alum and QLogic’s SVP Sales & Marketing Scott Genereaux, the mastermind behind the surge in QLogic’s design wins, takes on the CEO of Nirvanix to take the cloud player to the next level.

Here is a video interview that we had with Scott Genereux at VMworld 2010.

Data at Scale is the Key to Cloud

Scott talks about the key to cloud as being virtualization. Now Scott can take his knowledge and leadership to Nirvanix to scale them to an acquisition or IPO.

I predict that Nivanix will be acquired by a big player like Verizon or enterprise private cloud player. We’ll be following Scott and Nirvanix.