Thursday Feb 07, 2008
Thursday Feb 07, 2008
In the last
weeks I had a look on the new website of my cousin. After a few clicks I saw something about cable
virtualization. Cable virtualization? The first question went through my mind
was what the hell is cable virtualization.
I called
him and asked him some questions about it. He said there is a company which has
a technology to virtualizes your cable in the data center. At http://www.xsigo.com I found some great
information.
What this
idea behind this?
The idea is
pretty simple and cool. You have a box in the datacenter which is connected to
your Fibre Channel SAN, gigabit network and you servers.
This box
(they call it “Xsigo I/O Director“) connect to all
application servers with a 10Gb/s interface. In the application server is only
one network interface. A special 10Gb/s interface. Over this interface the server
get virtualized other network interfaces and host bus adapters. They
communicate over the 10Gb/s with the I/O Director. In the I/O Director they are
physically connected to the SAN or LAN.
With this
solution you can add new network interfaces or host bus adapter in 30 seconds
to your application server. You are also able to move this HBA or NIC to a
other server in your datacenter.
I think
this is very cool.
With big
partners like Microsoft and VMware there can be a big future for this product.
I hope I have the possibility to check this technology live in a datacenter or a testlab.
This is indeed a very cool product. They have recently struck a deal with Dell too.
The value of Xsigo with its I/O Virtualization capabilities, ability to provide QoS to each VM and flexibly add/delete/modify/move virtual NICs and HBAs is unmatched in the industry.
The operational benefits and capex savings are tangible, measurable and immediate.
Posted by James Nelson on March 18, 2009 at 03:15 PM CET #