Xsigo's offering features several key elements.
At the core is its Fabric Director, which connects servers through one set of ports and uplinks to the LAN and SAN through another set of ports; a physical host adapter card within each server connects to the Fabric Director. This card can be either a 10 Gbit Ethernet host adapter or 40 G or 56 G InfiniBand. "We provide the fat pipe to the server, and you decide how to divvy that up," says Toor.
The Fabric Manager enables enterprises to create, monitor and manage network and storage connections across all servers. From a single console, the user can create and manage connectivity, monitor performance and apply repeatable configurations to any number of servers. The Fabric Accelerator, a software add-on, creates and manages virtual Ethernet connections from one server to another. These connections move server-to-server traffic entirely over the Xsigo fabric. Finally, the Performance Monitor, a plug-in to the Manager, provides a consolidated view of I/O usage across all storage and networking resources.
Dan Shipley, an IT architect at Supplies Network, which provides a cloud-based managed print service to customers across the United States, says Xsigo has helped the company run a completely virtualized environment, right down to the desktop level, for its 300 employees.
"We have a completely flat and collapsed infrastructure," he says. "About 98% of traffic is now east-west within the data center." Supplies Network did look at Cisco offerings (it runs Cisco gear outside the data center), but Xsigo's simplicity and ease of use, as well as support for InfiniBand, made for a more cost-effective approach. "It makes networking extremely fast and easy to use," says Shipley.
Supplies Network has been able to simplify the wiring in the data center while enjoying connection speeds of 80 Gbps. "Everything runs across Ethernet Fibre Channel," says Shipley. "The speeds we get freak people out. We have so much bandwidth. It's ridiculous."
The company is also able to make changes to the data center with no downtime.
One of Shipley's concerns was the level of support he would get from a smaller company such as Xsigo, but he says he has been pleased with the support for the product, as well as with the performance and price point. "The support is awesome."
Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, says different kinds of computing have given rise to smaller companies such as Xsigo. "Whenever computing models change, incumbents often don't follow."
He says data fabrics have become "all of the rage" data centers, and that InfiniBand is getting more attention in that environment. "There are things InfiniBand does well. It's a solid protocol to build on."
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