Ethernet and Fibre Channel PCIe Sharing
VIO-4001 Ethernet and Fibre Channel PCIe Sharing Appliance
The award-winning VIO-4001 PCIe Sharing Appliance consolidates and virtualizes 10 Gbps Ethernet (10 GbE) and 8 Gbps Fibre Channel (FC) storage connectivity to a rack of servers and provides up to 40 Gbps of Ethernet and up to 32 Gbps of FC uplink bandwidth to up to 16 servers. The VIO-4001 also improves the capability of virtualized servers by providing VMs with the highest flexibility for connectivity bandwidth and configurable access to I/O. The VIO-4001 removes the physical Ethernet NICs and Fibre Channel HBAs from servers within a rack, leaving the servers as compute and memory engines. The I/O adapters are pooled and consolidated within the VIO-4001 from which you create virtual images of the I/O adapters (vNICs and vHBAs) that are presented to each server. The vNICs and vHBAs emulate physical adapters and don’t require any changes to the server, OS, applications or I/O device drivers. The VIO-4001 enables multiple servers to simultaneously access and share physical adapters.
The VIO-4001 PCIe Sharing Appliance connects to up to 16 servers using PCI Express® (PCIe) cables that connect to the server-native PCIe bus and provides 16 Gbps bandwidth per connection to each server. The PCIe cable replaces multiple Ethernet and FC cables per server. The VIO-4001 provides up to four 10 GbE and up to four 8 Gbps FC uplinks to the servers and connects directly to corporate networks and storage infrastructure without additional fabric nor layer of switching. This reduces I/O capital equipment costs, I/O power consumption, server management complexity and operational expenses by more than 60% compared to traditional Ethernet and FC deployments.
The VIO-4001 PCIe Sharing Appliance enables servers to be wired once and dynamically reconfigured with different Ethernet and FC profiles without any physical reconfiguration. The available bandwidth can be dynamically allocated among and optimized between servers based on demand. The network and storage connectivity to the servers is managed and optimized through a web-based management console or a command-line interface.
