Xsigo First to Market With Virtualized Server Fabric to Enable Cloud Data Centers

"Of the fundamental data center building blocks — servers, storage, and the network connectivity that ties it all together — only connectivity remains as it was twenty years ago, locked to an inflexible and inefficient switch and port-based management model," said Zeus Kerravala of the Yankee Group. "The cloud computing era places demands on data center infrastructure that cannot be met through traditional networking technologies. Xsigo’s Server Fabric technology changes all this by addressing the desperate market need to fully integrate resources, while also providing unprecedented levels of simplification through software."

Legacy switch vendors like Cisco, Brocade, and Juniper have embraced cloud lingo in their marketing, but their "fabric" solutions remain based on traditional switches and ports — in effect, wrapping legacy technologies designed for yesterday’s distributed computing in new standards and management layers. This increases complexity without addressing the fundamental problems of hardware dependency, manageability, inflexible architectures, incompatible technologies, and control over quality of service.

"Cloud data centers demand a different, far more flexible infrastructure, and everyone knows it," said Lloyd Carney, Xsigo CEO. "But while legacy networking vendors remain mired in the status quo, essentially trying to cross oceans with railroads, Xsigo has invented the equivalent of the airplane. Today, Xsigo is ushering in a new era of data center connectivity — virtualized infrastructure — that does for the data center infrastructure what server virtualization did for the servers themselves."

As the first technology to virtualize connectivity, the Xsigo Server Fabric allows hardware-independent connections between resources to be dynamically created without having to configure switches, switch ports, or VLANs, thus enabling management tasks to be completed by a single person in minutes, rather than by multiple teams over the course of hours or days.

The Xsigo Server Fabric lets customers flexibly deploy Ethernet and Fibre Channel connections at speeds up to 40 Gbps, resulting in significant application acceleration. Environments can be scaled to 1,000 physical hosts with tens of thousands of virtual connections linking virtual machines to each other and to network and storage resources. Because the Server Fabric is fully interoperable with existing core networking products from Cisco, Brocade, Juniper and others, and because it enables greater utilization of those assets, customers can extend the life of their existing hardware to minimize disruption and reduce capital costs.

"The value proposition of cloud computing is based on efficient agility and flexibility, but in reality, the complexity of traditional data center infrastructure has made this hard to achieve," said Aaron Branham, director of information technology at Bluelock, a VMware vCloud Datacenter service provider. "With Xsigo, we get a fully virtualized network infrastructure allowing us to deliver, scale, and manage new services with incredible ease. As a result, we can quickly meet our customers’ ever-changing requirements."

For cloud service providers, enterprises, and other large organizations, the Xsigo Server Fabric promises a significant business impact. New services can be brought to market much more quickly, using a simple software interface that allows data center architecture to be reconfigured instantly. Customers can easily meet and manage performance levels across all applications, and provide additional capacity on demand, enabling the creation of highly profitable tiered service offerings.