Two companies in the I/O virtualization space rolled out appliances last week at VMworld that allow IT managers to virtualize their connections between servers and the network and storage with standard RJ-45 Ethernet technology.
Virtensys introduced the VIO-4004 system, which virtualizes network connectivity to a rack of servers and provides up to 80Gbps of sustained Ethernet bandwidth per server. The VIO-4004 increases performance while minimizing I/O processing.
The VIO-4000 appliance let’s IT managers cable servers once and then reconfigure then as necessary. The VIO-4004 can virtualize up to four Intel Ethernet X520 dual-port 10 GbE adapters and aggregate their performance. It creates up to 256 virtual adapters in each of the servers.
Xsigo also introduced an adapter-free version of its I/O Director which uses the built-in Ethernet capabilities of any x86-based server. The company is positioning its adapter-free I/O Director as an alternative to the much more expensive Fibre Channel over Ethernet.The Xsigo I/O Director also allows as many as 64 Ethernet or Fibre Channel networks to be attached via a single Ethernet cable. The appliance is available In September starting at $35,000.
HP on Thursday finally acquired 3PAR for $33 per share after a bidding war that escalated last night when Dell raised its bid to $32 per share. This morning Dell stepped away from the bidding when HP again upped its bid for the high-end storage provider.
HP again upped the bid for 3PAR to $2 billion — it’s not done yet.
Dell Friday morning matched HP’s bid for 3PAR of $1.8 billion, nine times the revenue of 3PAR. Bidding is escalating since Dell’s original bid of $18 a share.
Yesterday HP upped its bid for 3PAR to $1.8 billion, $27 per share in cash. It offered 3PAR an 11% premium over Dell’s bid yesterday morning. It’s going to go over $2 billion but don’t expect it to end before the week-end. More drama next week.
WhipTail Tech announced on Wednesday that its Datacenter XLR8r solid-state storage appliance now supports synchronous and asynchronous high-availability. With two appliances connected via dual 10Gb Ethernet, a heartbeat function synchronizes the devices. Data can be written to either appliance at any time. Asynchronous HA allows the replication of two geographically disperse devices. The HA solution is expected to be available in September starting at $15,000.
Coraid on Wednesday announced the EtherDrive SRX4200, a new SATA, SAS or SSD drive array targeted at high-performance cloud and enterprise data centers. The SRX4200 has performance of as much as 1,800MB/sec. and has multiple 10Gb Ethernet connections. Each SRX4200 has a maximum capacity of 108TB. In addition, Coraid announced an RESTful management interface for enabling cloud automation and scripting. Coraid’s Ethernet SAN runs on Layer 2 Ethernet, eliminating complex layers of legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage. The new SRX4200 is available now.
