Virtensys Announces PCIe-Sharing Solutions with Micron’s Enterprise Solid-State Storage

Friday, 26 August 2011

New Virtensys PCIe Sharing Solutions Brings Shared Enterprise SSD Technology to the Virtual Data Center

MANCHESTER, England and BEAVERTON, Ore. – August 29, 2011 – Virtensys™ Ltd, a provider of PCIe Sharing solutions, today announced two new Virtensys VIO-4000 models: the VIO-4010 and the VIO-4012. These new products incorporate the Virtensys award-winning PCIe sharing technology and Micron Technology’s high-performance RealSSD™ P300 and P320h enterprise solid state drives to help organizations remove I/O bottlenecks and extend the scale of today’s virtualized data centers.

Customers are now able to reap the benefits of PCIe Sharing and virtualized SSDs together, simplifying data center operations and realizing significant cost/power savings through increased efficiency. The Virtensys VIO-4010 appliance provides virtualized shared access to disk-based enterprise SSD resources through the use of its virtual RAID technology. The solution leverages the Micron P300 enterprise SSD and supports configurations that contain either 100 GB or 200 GB drives, capacity configurations will range from 800 GB to 1.6 TB, and will also include support for multiple virtualized 10 GbE vNICs. The VIO-4012 will utilize the Micron P320h PCIe based SSD solutions and will be sold in varying capacity configurations.

"Virtensys provides data center administrators with innovative new ways to experience the benefits of enterprise SSDs through their consolidated infrastructure models,” said Gary Gentry, general manager of the enterprise division of Micron’s NAND solutions group. “By leveraging Micron’s SATA and PCIe solid-state solutions, Virtensys is able to provide customers with a fast, reliable and power efficient approach to virtualized storage."

The VIO-4010 allows up to 16 servers to access a pool of shared SSDs, with each server accessing their own partition of high-performance storage. Virtualized SSD can be used for high-speed local data stores, as well as virtual swap partitions for hypervisors, which will allow SSD-based storage to be utilized as "host cache," an extension of the host's memory for swapping related functions. Also, virtualized SSD storage can be used for a server's boot partition/drive; servers no longer require local disk installed within the host itself. This makes servers "stateless" and removes the physical dependency on I/O resources; physical servers can be easily moved around the virtual data center as their I/O resources are managed centrally and can be assigned/re-assigned on-demand.

“For many IT environments today, I/O is a bottleneck. We are pleased to work with Micron to help our joint customers consolidate, share, and dynamically allocate I/O resources based on their application needs,” said John Nicholson, chief executive officer and chairman of Virtensys. “We are looking forward to our relationship with Micron and the combined benefits that we can now bring to our customers.”

Availability

The VIO-4010 is available now. The VIO-4012 will be available by the end of the year.