Virtualized Server Fabric From Xsigo

Xsigo Systems, Inc. announced the Xsigo Server Fabric, a virtualised infrastructure for cloud-optimised data centres.

          
The heart of the Server Fabric is the Private Virtual Interconnect, a software-defined link between two resources. Each Private Virtual Interconnect is a standalone network connection with up to 40 Gbps bandwidth to deliver fast server connection.

The Xsigo Server Fabric enables one-click network connections from virtual machines to any data centre resource – including servers, networks, storage, and other virtual machines – to accelerate the management of virtualised data centres. Xsigo’s Server Fabric technology eliminates the last remaining hardware constraints on the agility and scalability of the cloud. As a result, new services can be brought to market 10 times faster, delivered at guaranteed levels of performance, and seamlessly scaled to a thousand physical hosts, all at a 50 percent lower cost of operation.
 
"Of the fundamental data centre building blocks – servers, storage, and the network connectivity that ties it all together – only connectivity remains as it was twenty years ago, locked to an inflexible and inefficient switch and port-based management model," said Zeus Kerravala of the Yankee Group. "The cloud computing era places demands on data centre infrastructure that cannot be met through traditional networking technologies. Xsigo’s Server Fabric technology changes all this by addressing the desperate market need to fully integrate resources, while also providing unprecedented levels of simplification through software."
 
Legacy switch vendors like Cisco, Brocade, and Juniper have embraced cloud lingo in their marketing, but their fabric solutions remain based on traditional switches and ports – in effect, wrapping legacy technologies designed for yesterday’s distributed computing in new standards and management layers. This increases complexity without addressing the fundamental problems of hardware dependency, manageability, inflexible architectures, incompatible technologies, and control over quality of service.
 
"Cloud data centres demand a different, far more flexible infrastructure, and everyone knows it," said Lloyd Carney, Xsigo CEO. "But while legacy networking vendors remain mired in the status quo, essentially trying to cross oceans with railroads, Xsigo has invented the equivalent of the airplane. Today, Xsigo is ushering in a new era of data centre connectivity – virtualised infrastructure – that does for the data centre infrastructure what server virtualisation did for the servers themselves."
 
As the first technology to virtualise connectivity, the Xsigo Server Fabric allows hardware-independent connections between resources to be dynamically created without having to configure switches, switch ports, or VLANs, thus enabling management tasks to be completed by a single person in minutes, rather than by multiple teams over the course of hours or days.
 
The Xsigo Server Fabric lets customers flexibly deploy Ethernet and FC connections at speeds up to 40 Gbps, resulting in application acceleration. Environments can be scaled to 1,000 physical hosts with tens of thousands of virtual connections linking virtual machines to each other and to network and storage resources. Because the Server Fabric is fully interoperable with existing core networking products from Cisco, Brocade, Juniper and others, and because it enables greater utilisation of those assets, customers can extend the life of their existing hardware to minimise disruption and reduce capital costs.

"The value proposition of cloud computing is based on efficient agility and flexibility, but in reality, the complexity of traditional data centre infrastructure has made this hard to achieve," said Aaron Branham, director of information technology at Bluelock, a VMware vCloud Datacenter service provider. "With Xsigo, we get a fully virtualised network infrastructure allowing us to deliver, scale, and manage new services with incredible ease. As a result, we can quickly meet our customers’ ever-changing requirements."
 
For cloud service providers, enterprises, and other large organisations, the Xsigo Server Fabric promises a  business impact. New services can be brought to market much  quickly, using a  software interface that allows data centre architecture to be reconfigured instantly. Customers can  meet and manage performance levels across all applications, and provide additional capacity on demand, enabling the creation of  profitable tiered service offerings.
 
About the Xsigo Server Fabric
The Xsigo Server Fabric solution consists of multiple Xsigo components available now – the Xsigo I/O Director and Xsigo XMS Management Software – together with a software upgrade package called the SFS 1.0 Server Fabric Suite. The upgrade package includes host drivers, a management software plug-in, and operating software designed specifically to deliver the enhanced features and scalability of the Xsigo Server Fabric. The SFS 1.0 Server Fabric Suite will be available in December 2011. It is licensed on a per-physical-host basis at a list price of $1,000 per host.       
 
Xsigo Server Fabric Technology Partner Program
Xsigo also announced the Server Fabric Alliance, a program that brings together technologies from vendors committed to arming mutual customers with integrated solutions to accelerate the deployment of fully virtualised data centres. Initial partners in the Server Fabric Alliance program include: Blue Coat Systems, Hitachi Data Systems, Infoblox, Nimble Storage, Nimbus Data Systems, SolidFire, TrendMicro, Vyatta and Zenoss.