Xsigo Raises New VC Funding

Xsigo Systems, Inc., in data center I/O virtualization, raised a new round of funding by investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners to support the growing market demand for its virtual I/O technology.

Additionally, the company reported 25% quarter over quarter growth and experienced record customer deployments. Currently, Xsigo provides its virtual I/O solution to over 35 customers around the globe, many of them Fortune 500 companies in business-critical markets including telecommunications, healthcare, education, financial services, government, managed service providers, and technology.

Virtual I/O is gaining increasing importance as IT managers seek new answers to data center connectivity challenges. Gartner recently issued a report titled, Case Study: Cloud Provider Achieves Ten Times Lower Total Cost of Ownership Over FCoE With Input/Output Virtualization. The report details how "a global online transaction service provider leveraged server virtualization and external input/output (I/O) virtualization in its colocated data centers to reduce server provisioning time from weeks to hours and to reduce on-site support expertise requirements to ‘night watchman’ levels."

In the report, Gartner recommends: "When deploying server virtualization, companies should consider I/O virtualization choices, particularly external I/O virtualization, as ways to significantly reduce costs, and improve agility and performance." The report concludes, "External I/O virtualization can significantly reduce TCO, from initial provisioning through ongoing operations. When I/O virtualization is combined with server virtualization, server provisioning times can be reduced by 99% and network capital costs can be reduced by 50% or more."

Jeff McCarthy, Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners, commented: "We believe Xsigo’s brand of I/O virtualization reinvents infrastructure provisioning – a data center operation that has not been updated for over 20 years. We continue to invest in Xsigo because they represent the data center of the future, not just a technology trend that will be gone tomorrow."

The company received and announced Microsoft’s WHQL certification – the industry’s first and only such certification to date for a dedicated I/O virtualization solution. The WHQL qualification indicates that the Xsigo I/O Director has met the standards of Microsoft and that the product has been designed to work with the Windows operating system.