VirtenSys today 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.
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.