PrimaCloud announced today that it has deployed the Xsigo I/O Director as the foundation of its data center interconnect strategy.
The Xsigo I/O Director enables PrimaCloud to break the barriers of I/O throughput seen in existing cloud computing offerings, allowing end customers to experience application performance levels that would previously have been achievable only in purpose-built private datacenters. Additionally, Xsigo’s virtual I/O infrastructure allows PrimaCloud to automatically provision cost-effective virtual private datacenters for its customers within minutes.
With three years of experience providing cloud computing under the ENKI name, PrimaCloud management was seeing an increasing number of enterprise clients running database and transaction-intensive applications — such as Oracle — which required multi-gigabit connections to the vLAN and NAS storage to avoid I/O contention. In these applications the bandwidth required per virtual machine exceeded 3Gb/sec, which meant that a single cloud server running ten virtual machines required over 30Gb/sec total I/O bandwidth. Only Xsigo virtual I/O, with dual redundant 20Gb/sec I/O connections per server, provided the required performance. The Xsigo I/O Director’s low-latency bandwidth also serves to take maximum advantage of PrimaCloud’s SSD-cached NAS systems to delivery outstanding application throughput.
PrimaCloud’s automatically managed, hypervisor-agnostic cloud architecture requires a high level of automation to create and manage virtual private datacenters (VPDCs). The Xsigo I/O Director is able to automatically provision and manage virtual I/O and VLANs associated with virtual instances running VMWare ESX, Citrix, HyperV, and 3Tera’s AppLogic, under the control of PrimaCloud’s implementation of Enigmatec’s EMS, a cross-platform, policy-based automation engine. Using EMS to configure the I/O Director eliminates manual labor in managing VPDCs, as well as permitting automatic scaling of VPDCs to respond to changes in load, resulting in significant end-customer cost savings.
Xsigo virtual I/O is a critical element of the reference datacenter architecture PrimaCloud uses to deliver on the promise of cloud computing: cost-effective, on-demand computing delivered on a pay-as-you-go-basis while meeting enterprise requirements for performance and uptime. The simplicity of deploying Xsigo Virtual I/O has enabled PrimaCloud’s reference architecture to be deployed in any one of its 65 datacenters worldwide for public, or hosted private cloud computing, as well as at customer sites.