Virtensys Company Information

Company

Virtensys was founded in December of 2005 and has developed industry-leading and patented I/O Virtualization technologies for servers and storage platforms. Virtensys solutions revolutionize how I/O infrastructure is deployed and used in data centers and deliver dramatic improvements in I/O utilization, cost, performance, power consumption and manageability. The full capabilities of Virtensys I/O Virtualization switches can be utilized without disruption to existing servers and networks, protecting previous IT infrastructure investments. The I/O Virtualization switches are deployed in traditional rack or blade server environments and with server virtualization installations.

Virtensys was founded by leading technologists with years of experience in high-performance switching, networking and systems design. The company has assembled a top-notch team of industry veterans drawn from Adaptec, Brocade, Fujitsu, HP, ICL and Intel. The Virtensys team is further strengthened with financial backing from several premier European technology venture capital firms.

The company maintains headquarters and design centers in the United Kingdom and the West Coast of the USA to provide direct local access to its customers.

Data Center Dynamics

The explosion of business services and applications is driving data center complexity and costs. This trend requires a data center infrastructure that quickly responds to dynamic workloads while reducing expenses and energy consumption. Several new technologies such as server virtualization, storage virtualization and blade servers have been introduced to optimize the operations of data centers. These efficiency improvements, however, are limited by the existing I/O infrastructure. Although the I/O adapters' performance, complexity, capabilities and cost have grown, the I/O infrastructure deployment model has not changed, remains complex and hinders data center agility. Each server typically still contains several dedicated internal I/O adapters (1 and 10 Gbps Ethernet NICs, Fibre Channel HBAs, SAS/SATA RAID, graphics, etc), which on average are utilized at less than 15% of their available I/O bandwidth and capability. In addition, each server still connects to network and storage aggregation switches using multiple network and storage cables per server before reaching the corporate networks. This I/O deployment model wastes power, increases cooling requirements and makes the I/O infrastructure inflexible, expensive and costly to manage and maintain.

Virtensys I/O Virtualization Solution

Virtensys' vision is that data center servers and storage systems will no longer physically contain complex high-speed I/O adapters. Instead, corporate network connectivity is provided through the native PCI Express interface to an external pool of virtualized, shared and highly utilized, standard I/O resources. Further, network and storage aggregation switches are eliminated and all the network cables connected to each server are replaced with a single PCI Express cable.

Virtensys I/O Virtualization switches are industry-leading, cost-effective solutions that deliver all the benefits of I/O Virtualization without performance degradation or disruption to existing data center infrastructures and processes. The company's products can be deployed in data centers of large and small enterprises in conjunction with new installations of rack-mounted or blade servers and storage systems, which are growing at a CAGR of 9.9% and will reach 12 million new installed servers by 2010. Similarly, the products can also be deployed with the existing installed base of server and storage systems, which are growing at a CAGR of 16% and will reach about 43 million installed servers worldwide by 2010. Virtensys sells its products through the major server and storage Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) and System Integrators (SI).

The company has formed an active end-user IT Advisory Council that consists of IT executives from a wide range of organizations and industries. The Advisory Council provides vital insight into the real-life, daily issues faced by IT managers, as well as information about their IT requirements, usage models and deployment schemes.