Verari crosses blades with virtual I/O house

Xsigo to storage blades: lemme I/O you

By Austin Modine • Get more from this author

Posted in Storage, 27th May 2008 19:36 GMT

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Verari Systems is now packing its network storage blades with a virtual I/O appliance, courtesy of a partnership with Xsigo Systems.

The companies say the product union is ideal for the input/output strains of virtualization, and results in better CPU utilization, less cabling and easier management for IT admins.

Their joint offering teams Verari's BladeRack 2 X-Series network storage blades with Xsigo's VP780 I/O Director.

Xsigo's appliance virtualizes the I/O from server to storage to replace the multiple physical network adapters and HBAs (host bus adapter) that are traditionally necessary. The device connects to servers through 24 10Gb/s ports and to storage through 15 I/O modules supporting Ethernet, Fibre Channel or Infiniband connections.

Verari's blades have up to 32 storage connections and 64 network connections per blade.

Together, it provides server I/O to be configured, managed and migrated system-wide from a single console.

"While server blades and server virtualization represent major efficiency advancements, the combination strains the limitations of today's server I/O," said Xsigo CEO Lloyd Carney in the release.

According to Verari, the offering provides the I/O density and compute to deploy twice as many virtual machines per blade.

The package is available now through Verari, although it won't give a price — as it says the systems are built specifically for individual customers. ®

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