Ethernet and Local Direct Attached Storage PCIe Sharing
VIO-4008 Ethernet and Local Direct Attached Storage PCIe Sharing Appliance
The award-winning VIO-4008 PCIe Sharing Appliance consolidates and virtualizes network and local storage connectivity to a rack of servers and provides up to 40 Gbps of Ethernet uplink bandwidth and up to 16 TB of local RAID storage connectivity to the connected servers. The VIO-4008 eliminates, consolidates and virtualizes 10 GbE Ethernet NICs. The VIO-4008 connects to up to 16 servers and shares the physical NICs as virtual NICs (vNICs) between the servers without requiring any changes to the servers, OS, applications or I/O device drivers. The VIO-4008 provides up to four 10 GbE uplinks to the attached servers and connects directly to the corporate network without any additional fabric. The VIO-4008 also virtualizes up to two 6 G SAS/SATA RAID controllers and shares these between the servers as vHBAs. It includes 8 disk drive bays that provide >16 TB of local Direct Attached Storage (DAS) shared between the servers, thus eliminating the need for internal drives in the servers. The VIO-4010 supports traditional and SSD drives in different RAID levels.
The VIO-4008 PCIe Sharing Appliance attaches to each server using PCI Express® (PCIe) cables that connect to the server-native PCIe bus and provides 16 Gbps bandwidth per server connection. The PCIe cable replaces multiple Ethernet cables and carries both Ethernet and DAS traffic. The Top-of-Rack Ethernet access layer switches are also eliminated. This reduces I/O capital equipment costs and lowers I/O power consumption, server management complexity and operational expenses by more than 60% compared to traditional deployments.The VIO-4008 PCIe Sharing Appliance enables servers to be wired once and dynamically reconfigured with different Ethernet and DAS profiles - without any physical reconfiguration. The networking bandwidth and storage capacity can be dynamically allocated and optimized among the servers on-demand. Denser 1U or sub-1U servers can replace traditional 2U or larger servers. The connectivity to the servers is managed and optimized through a web-based management console or a command-line interface.
