Salvatore Genovese

VirtenSys, Ltd has announced the general availability of its flagship 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 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).

What Industry Analysts Are Saying

“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.”