QLogic
More info
- Released
- 1994–2016
- Owner
- Cavium (2016), Marvell (from 2018)
- Type
- Hardware maker
The Emulex spin-off that became its parent's fiercest competitor in server storage adapters.
QLogic was carved out of Emulex in 1994 around its SCSI chip business and settled in Aliso Viejo, a short drive from the parent. For the next decade the two effectively split the market for Fibre Channel host bus adapters between them: if you bought a server for a SAN, the card inside almost certainly came from one of them, usually wearing the server vendor's badge.
Once Ethernet got fast enough to carry storage traffic, QLogic pushed converged adapters that spoke both, but the Fibre Channel market kept shrinking. Cavium bought the company in 2016, and Marvell bought Cavium in 2018 — so both siblings ended up inside chipmakers that collected them along the way.