I/O Virtualization Switches Available From Start-Up VirtenSys

VirtenSys, Ltd announced the availability of its I/O virtualization switches, the VirtenSys VIO 4000 Series based on its Virtual Connectivity Cloud platform.

With this announcement, VirtenSys became the first company to release production units of I/O virtualization switches based on PCI Express standards. The VIO 4000 switches are the first products on the market to consolidate, virtualize and share the major types of server networking and storage connectivity, including Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), SAS/SATA, and Fibre Channel, without requiring any changes be made to the servers, networks, or I/O adapters. The switches are available through the VirtenSys worldwide partner network, and the products’ full capabilities will be demonstrated at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco, Calif.

The VIO 4000 switches reduce rack and blade server management complexity and costs by more than 60 percent, improve I/O utilization to greater than 80 percent, deliver full connectivity bandwidth to servers, halve equipment cost, and reduce I/O power consumption by more than 60 percent. This results in providing 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).

“With budgets under pressure and the need to quickly migrate to a greener IT infrastructure, CIOs continuously need to improve data center management efficiency and reduce capital expenditures and power consumption without disrupting their existing processes,” said Joe Skorupa, research VP at Gartner, Inc. “I/O virtualization has the potential to enhance data center operations and help speed the transition to web-based applications by reducing costs, enabling consolidated and remote I/O management without physical reconfiguration, and removing the I/O bottlenecks that may result from increased server utilization.”

“The I/O infrastructure in many of today’s datacenters is over-provisioned, underutilized, complex, inflexible, expensive and power-hungry,” commented Matt Eastwood, group vice president at IDC. “The VirtenSys approach to virtualize and share the I/O resources will help remove these I/O bottlenecks and allow IT organizations to run traditional and cloud-based applications more efficiently and increase their servers’ workloads while reducing costs and power requirements.”

“The VirtenSys VIO switches enable us to provide a complete, end-to-end virtualization solution to our customers," stated Dale Foster, president at Promark Technology. "The switches are totally transparent to the existing servers and data centers, and can be deployed immediately. The VirtenSys solution is a great fit to all of our customers, from SMBs to large enterprises, and enables them to realize tremendous benefits of cost reduction and power savings.”

“VirtenSys I/O virtualization technology and products are unique, non-disruptive, and preserve investments in our IT infrastructure,” said Kevin Cantoni, vice president of product development at PayPal. “I/O virtualization is an important part of our green IT strategy.”

“The current I/O bottleneck is constraining our capability to respond to the explosion of services and applications and to take full advantage of other data center optimization initiatives,” said Ajay Srivastava, VP OnDemand Platform at Oracle. “I/O virtualization gives us a better flexibility to migrate applications within a grid.”

Virtualized operating systems can leverage the capabilities of I/O virtualization to further improve data centers operations. “The VirtenSys approach to I/O virtualization complements VMware vSphere 4 to help customers achieve greater flexibility, manageability and efficiency in IT infrastructure deployments,” said Shekar Ayyar, vice president of infrastructure alliances, VMware. “VirtenSys solutions help customers create an easily managed converged infrastructure to cut down on operational costs while increasing staff productivity and improving service-level agreements.”

“I am very excited to launch our products in the channel, following our recent funding announcement at the beginning of the month,” said Ahmet Houssein, president and CEO at VirtenSys. “There is strong customer demand for I/O virtualization to solve I/O bottleneck issues. Our products are introduced at the perfect time – the beginning of a new cycle of IT infrastructure optimization – and will become a catalyst to the next-generation green IT data centers. We are in an excellent position to continue building on the traction we have generated at key OEM customers and end-users.”

About VirtenSys IOV Products
VirtenSys I/O virtualization products create virtualized I/O clouds where servers’ I/O resources are pooled, consolidated, and dynamically allocated on demand based on the applications needs. The VIO 4000 switches connect directly to multiple physical servers and support Intel 10 GE NICs, Neterion 10GE NICs, QLogic Fibre Channel HBAs and LSI SAS/SATA MegaRAID controllers.

The switches can be deployed immediately and provide additional key benefits to customers, including:

• Extend the data center life cycle by eliminating multiple layers of aggregation switches, I/O adapters, disk drives, and cables
• Reduce management expenses by minimizing human intervention and removing the need for physical reconfiguration
• Protect organizations’ investments in their IT infrastructure by being totally transparent to servers, networks, and management processes
• Enable new usage models by seamlessly integrating with traditional or virtualized data centers
• Enhance data center reliability by supporting multiple failover schemes, including active-active, active-passive and N+1 redundancy