QLogic 10Gb Ethernet Adapters accelerate application performance by 10X

Striving to improve health outcomes for providers, patients and consumers, Hart designs health utility solutions such as medication adherence, remote monitoring of in-home patients, and secure peer-to-peer video. These solutions generate huge data flows, which were creating a bottleneck for Hart’s network and impacting application performance. In addition, high infrastructure costs were becoming an obstacle to Hart’s ability to rapidly scale, a key component of their business strategy.
Upon deploying QLogic 3400 Series Intelligent Ethernet Adapters, patient information queries that had been requiring up to two minutes were completed within seconds, allowing near real-time application response. At the same time, infrastructure deployment costs dropped from $180-$200K per rack to $150K per rack, with time-to-deployment reduced by 40 percent.

“Because we’re continually moving massive amounts of data to deep archive with Hadoop, our network is always?busy. We needed to be able to store and access data as close to real-time as possible,” said Mohamed Alkady, president of Hart. “It only took about a half a day to get the new adapters deployed, tested and operating and now we are able to pull in data incredibly fast. For example, we recently received 4.5 million records from a partner to analyse, which would?have taken so much longer without the QLogic 10GbE adapters.”

“Hart is a prime real-world example of why more and more end-users are turning to QLogic 10GbE solutions to solve bottlenecks, improve greater efficiencies and achieve faster results,” said Vikram Karvat, vice president of products, marketing and planning, QLogic. “Our enhanced portfolio of 10GbE solutions delivers exceptional value and unparalleled performance through unique features such as switch-independent NIC partitioning (NPAR).”

Designed for both bare-metal and virtual environments, QLogic NPAR is switch-agnostic, enabling administrators to split up the 10GbE network pipe to divide and reallocate bandwidth and resources at the adapter level, as needed. This reduces implementation time and lowers the total cost of 10GbE migrations. By making it possible to separate network workloads, yet still guarantee bandwidth to critical applications across a single wire, QLogic NPAR technology will play a key role in Hart’s plans to make a push into the burgeoning consumer application market.

“We were facing challenges in segmenting our network workloads without adding more physical adapters,” said Alkady. “QLogic NPAR technology allowed us to essentially multihome our systems by partitioning the adapters into multiple network streams. In conjunction with the Quality of Service (QoS) feature, NPAR allowed us granular control over bandwidth allocation to each partitioned network stream to satisfy even our heaviest workload. Using a single adapter and PCIe slot, we were able to continue deploying 1U servers, which ultimately saved us cost and space in our data centre. Other solutions we looked at would have required two or more physical adapters and 2U servers to realise the same results we achieved with the QLogic solution.”