Solution to Virtualize Storage controllers and HDDs in Servers From VirtenSys

VirtenSys, Ltd, a company delivering PCI Express-based I/O Virtualization (IOV) switches for data centers, announced the industry’s first virtualization of storage controllers and disk drives in servers.



With this achievement, VirtenSys becomes the first company to consolidate and optimize the most commonly deployed networking and storage connectivity in servers. VirtenSys IOV switches now support Ethernet, SAS/SATA and Fibre Channel, and provide servers with the best price/performance and lowest energy consumption for accessing not only the local area networks (LAN), but also the storage infrastructures, including direct-attached storage (DAS) and storage area networks (SAN). The company has already delivered pre-production units of its switches to leading server and storage customers.

VirtenSys IOV switches now virtualize the LSI MegaRAID Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and share them between multiple physical servers, without introducing any changes to the servers, operating systems, applications, HBAs or device drivers. As a result, SAS/SATA disk drives are also consolidated inside the switches and allocated between the connected servers. The VirtenSys IOV systems dramatically reduce data center operational expense and complexity, improve I/O utilization to greater than 80 percent, enhance throughput, half equipment cost and reduce I/O power consumption by more than 60 percent.

“This is a major accomplishment for VirtenSys and a great benefit to our customers, as we removed the last bastion of dedicated hardware in the server by virtualizing the storage controller and disk drives,” said Ahmet Houssein, president and CEO of VirtenSys. “We are now in the unique position to offer products that can virtualize and share the servers networking and storage interfaces. The addition of LSI products to our portfolio along with our recently announced support for Intel Ethernet Controllers and QLogic Fibre Channel HBAs enable us to deliver products with a matchless combination of capabilities that make them very well-suited for a variety of IT infrastructures.”

“LSI SAS adapters are ideal for use in systems across multiple data center configurations,” said Tony Afshary, director of DAS product marketing at LSI. “The LSI SAS HBAs and MegaRAID controllers are able to connect to SATA and SAS hard disk drives, allowing for tiered storage that optimizes costs and performance. The VirtenSys I/O Virtualization switches enable us to expand our market and provide customers with options for more I/O flexibility in their server deployments.”

VirtenSys IOV switches create virtualized I/O Clouds where servers’ I/O resources are pooled, consolidated, and dynamically allocated on demand based on the applications needs. The IOV switches provide servers connected to the I/O Cloud with the full connectivity bandwidth to the corporate network and storage infrastructures, eliminate multiple layers of aggregation switches, I/O adapters, disk drives and cables and extend the data center’s lifecycle. In addition, the switches reduce management expenses by 60 percent by removing the need for physical reconfiguration and minimizing human intervention. Deploying IOV switches and setting up virtual I/O Clouds is totally transparent to servers, networks, and management processes, protecting organizations’ investments in their IT infrastructure while speeding the migration towards new usage models such as cloud computing.