3Leaf

3Leaf Systems Scores $35 Million in Series C Funding

September 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

3Leaf Systems (previous coverage), a provider of virtualization solutions for enterprise data centers, today announced that it has secured new financing from a suite of blue-chip investors led by LSI Corporation with follow on investments by Alloy Ventures, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Intel Capital, and Storm Ventures.

3Leaf Systems says it will use the new capital to accelerate development of the company’s virtualization solutions and to expand sales and marketing activities.

Using 3Leaf’s products, enterprise data centers can dramatically increase their resource utilization and enhance their operational efficiency. The 3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server has been named a Best of VMworld award winner at VMworld 2007 for its innovation, value, performance, reliability and ease of use.

3Leaf Systems

[Source: Data Center Knowledge]

3Leaf Introduces V-8000 Virtual I/O Server 2.0

August 5, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

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3Leaf Systems today announced the general availability of 3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server version 2.0, a key component of 3Leaf Virtual Compute Environment. The new software release delivers disaster recovery, streamlined management, and enhanced availability for large x86 server deployments. The company claims the V-8000 version 2.0 software is the first I/O virtualization solution to run on standard off the shelf commodity x86 servers. 3Leaf’s new Virtual Compute Environment solution will be introduced at the Next Generation Data Center/LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

Powered by V-8000 version 2.0, 3Leaf’s Virtual Compute Environment solution delivers the following features and benefits to enterprise data centers and server farms:

Greatly simplified management and provisioning of large-scale server deployments, with asset hierarchies and separation between infrastructure architecture and ongoing operations, bringing true relief to IT departments.
Disaster recovery solution that automates service recovery of production server farms and sites to a consolidated recovery site.
Boosted operational agility with accelerators such as building composite servers from modular building blocks, application level provisioning without server reboot, and easy drag-and-drop operations.
Improved availability and resiliency, with a novel multi-pathing approach that eliminates operating system dependent setup and brings cost-effective I/O high-availability to every server farm.
Ease of solution deployment and investment protection with proven software running on standard x86 servers. The V-8000 Virtual I/O Server software runs on a commodity platform available from 3Leaf or commercial channels.
Now with a backbone I/O fabric of up to 40Gb/s, servers running the new release will have a wider data path for I/O-heavy operations, especially for heavily loaded hypervisor hosts and where VM migration such as VMotion requires an uninterrupted path.

3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server version 2.0 is available now. Customers have the option to order a complete system from 3Leaf including hardware and pre-installed software, or purchase the hardware independently and order the software and any installation and deployment services they need from 3Leaf. Pricing begins at US $2,500 per managed server, excluding the hardware platform price.

3Leaf Systems

3Leaf Systems Obtains Intel License For CPU Virtualization

March 31, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

3Leaf Systems today announced it has obtained a license for Intel’s QuickPath Interconnect, which will allow it to build virtualization support for Intel servers. Previously, the company only had a HyperTransport license and only supported AMD servers.

3Leaf uses a direct communication network between server CPUs so data does not have to go over an Ethernet or Fibre Channel connection. The company fabricates special virtualization processors for the motherboard to virtualize the CPUs, memory and I/O of the entire datacenter.

The 3Leaf technology breaks down the physical walls of x86 servers and makes their resources available, as needed, across the datacenter. One of the problems in data centers is one group of servers dedicated to a task might be running at 5 % utilization, while another group is maxed out and needs more CPU cycles and more memory.

“We are enabling the next generation of the datacenter, which are going to be dynamic data centers, where resources, compute, memory or I/O could be made available to the applications on an on demand basis rather than in a static way the way it exists today,” said B.V. Jagadeesh, president and CEO of 3Leaf.

“At the end of the day we’re almost reinventing the mainframe here,” said George Crump, founder and president of Storage Switzerland, an analyst firm focused on the storage and virtualization marketplaces. “I spoke to someone at American Express who said ‘VMware is great but I can’t scale outside the box.’ I think we’re going to see that, where flexibility will require the ability to virtualize outside of the sheet metal.”

The solution is an unusual one: a chip to handle the load balancing that goes into the processor socket. So instead of an Opteron or Xeon on the motherboard socket, a 3Leaf processor goes in its place. A PCI Express card isn’t an option, as the bus is not fast enough.

The AMD-based 3Leaf processor is planned for the first half of 2009 while the Intel one is planned for the first half of 2010.

[Source: InternetNews]