VirtenSys Aids Virtualization of Storage Controllers and Disk Drives in Servers

VirtenSys has announced the industry’s first virtualization of storage controllers and disk drives in servers.

 

According to officials, the VirtenSys IOV switches can now support Ethernet, SAS (News - Alert)/SATA and Fiber Channel. They can also provide servers with the a strong price/performance and low energy consumption for accessing the local area networks, or "LAN," and storage infrastructures.

 

VirtenSys (News - Alert) has already delivered pre-production units of its switches to major server and storage customers. These IOV switches can now virtualize the LSI MegaRAID Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and share them between multiple physical servers. All this is achieved without introducing any changes to the servers, operating systems, applications, HBAs or device drivers.

 

With that capability, SAS/SATA disk drives are consolidated inside the switches and allocated between the connected servers. The VirtenSys IOV systems offer a number of benefits such as reduction of data center operational expense and complexity, and improvement of I/O utilization to greater than 80 percent.

 

The system can also enhance throughput, and reduce I/O power consumption by more than 60 percent.

 

VirtenSys has become the first company to consolidate and optimize the most commonly deployed networking and storage connectivity in servers. Ahmet Houssein, president and CEO of VirtenSys sees this as a major accomplishment for VirtenSys and believes this will greatly benefit their customers.

 

By virtualizing the storage controller and disk drives, VirtenSys is in the unique position to offer products that can virtualize and share the servers networking and storage interfaces.

 

The company recently added LSI products to their portfolio and announced support for Intel (News - Alert) Ethernet Controllers and QLogic Fibre Channel HBAs. Houssein expects this will enable VirtenSys to deliver products with a unique combination of capabilities that make them very well-suited for a variety of IT infrastructures.

 

LSI supplies SAS ICs, HBAs and RAID controllers for servers and storage systems. Tony Afshary, director of DAS product marketing at LSI pointed out that their SAS adapters are ideal for use in systems across multiple data center configurations.

 

As LSI SAS HBAs and MegaRAID controllers can connect to SATA and SAS hard disk drives, they allow for tiered storage that optimizes costs and performance.

 

Afshary appreciates VirtenSys I/O Virtualization switches ability to help them expand their market and provide customers with options for more I/O flexibility in their server deployments.

 

In related news VirtenSys announced that it has successfully delivered the pre-production units of its I/O Virtualization Switch to reputed server and storage customers.