Xsigo I/O Virt Offers Instant Savings
Via its new Xsigo VP560 I/O Director, Xsigo has hit three hot buttons with I/O virtualization, cloud computing and VMware. Citing the new product's 2U size, affordability, interoperability and open systems architecture, the company says the VP560 I/O Director creates a modular building blocks based on standardized, rack-based computing architectures it calls "pods" that enable the efficient delivery of scalable compute resources.
According to Xsigo, "Pod architectures allow businesses to deploy compute resources in consistent, pre-configured racks that can be uniformly designed, built and managed. The result is deployment times reduced from weeks to hours and standardized management across pools of servers. The Xsigo VP560 I/O Director consolidates I/O and enables software management of I/O resources, eliminating the physical complexity and manual configuration that is found with traditional connectivity."
Jon Toor is VP of marketing at Xsigo. He says server virtualization has created excessive complexity, which the VP560 undoes because it requires only two physical connections per server (one of which is strictly for redundancy), compared to between 6 and 16 in many instances today.
"You have 70 percent fewer cards per server and a lot fewer switch ports at the other end of the wire," Toor notes. "We run connectivity to the server, and what goes out to Brocade is driven by bandwidth needs. It's more simple and efficient, and utilization goes up from 5 percent to 50 percent."
Cloudwise, this is a boon to customers who want any-to-any connectivity, as opposed to maintaining separate clouds for the Web or databases that lead to more and more wires, cards and complexity.
Evidently, VMware agrees with Xsigo's vision, because Toor says their reaction was "This really solves problems for us," which means it creates business for Xsigo. Toor says 90% of his company's 70 customers are also VMware customers.
The VP560 I/O Director is immediately available for $20,000, a price Toor says is "comparable" to the costs of competing technologies from HP and Cisco. Plus, he adds, his product wins out when it comes to openness, ease of use and scalability. As for ROI, he claims new customers start saving 30 percent to 70 percent on day one.
Question: Why should Microsoft sales partners add Hyper-V to their arsenals?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/26/2010 at 12:48 PM