TECHNOLOGY

Data Center Virtualization

I/O Virtualization

Data Center Virtualization

Corporations are looking for innovating, cost-effective ways to reduce capital and operating expenditures for IT while also demanding 100 percent up-time and more agility. Virtualization is seen as a key technology for improving the utilization of capital assets and enhancing systems manageability. Today, virtualization technology is primarily found in Server Virtualization and Storage Virtualization. These technologies enable data center managers to consolidate multiple servers and storage solution into fewer, better utilized, and more manageable hardware platforms that are much more agile.

The consolidation of many servers into a smaller number of high performance servers supporting multiple virtual machines, operating systems, and applications, has placed far greater demands on the I/O subsystems of servers. The costs of the high performance I/O adaptors (such as 10Gb Ethernet NICs and 8Gb Fiber Channel HBAs) required to meet these demands is becoming a higher percentage of the overall cost of the servers. However, the use of high performance I/O remains low because of the widely varying I/O requirements of different applications.

I/O Virtualization

I/O virtualization is a crucial addition to data center virtualization technology. It enables the full utilization and enhanced manageability of commodity data centers that has been promised for years, but only realised thus far in expensive proprietary systems.

I/O virtualization allows multiple servers to share a pool of I/O resources with LAN, WAN, and storage bandwidth being allocated on demand. Because servers no longer must be individually over-provisioned to cope with peak I/O demands, the I/O adaptor use is increased and minimizes provisioning for redundancy. By removing from servers all I/O adaptors--and indeed, all direct attached storage--data centers can be built with low cost 1U servers instead of 3U or 4U servers, resulting in significant reductions in floor space and power consumption. I/O resources become independent of servers, reducing the interdependencies between server and network/storage configuration and enabling automated system management.

VirtenSys Direct I/O Virtualization

First-generation virtualization technologies have typically provided significant operating cost advantages through enhanced server manageability. However, the cost of virtualization--in terms of capital expenditures, performance, and disruption of existing infrastructures and processes--has been high.

VirtenSys direct I/O virtualization brings the full benefits of I/O virtualization to commodity server data centers. By providing I/O adaptor consolidation and virtualization within the native CPU-I/O PCI interconnect fabric, VirtenSys products deliver all the utilization, manageability, and IT agility advantages of I/O virtualization while eliminating the cost of virtualization. VirtenSys products do this by:

Using standard high volume PCI I/O adaptors – eliminating the need for proprietary I/O gateways and allowing the rapid adoption of new I/O technologies.
Eliminating the need for a virtualization layer – a costly element of today’s “cost of virtualization”.
Eliminating the need for a new I/O interconnect network and the attendant costs of network adaptors, protocol translations, and encapsulations.
Providing transparency – the virtualization layer is totally invisible to the servers. Applications, operating systems, and drivers are completely unaffected by this functional change to their I/O resources.
Incorporating low power features and complexity levels that are compatible with blade server architectures and rack servers.