Reduced data center sprawl and total cost of ownership is the result of interface virtualization
October 19, 2011
NextIO today announced the general availability of its vNET I/O Maestro rack-level virtualization appliance. Each 3U appliance can support up to eight, hot-swappable PCIe network adapters. These adapters, in turn, can be shared by up to 30 servers in the same rack. These appliances, which are attached to the servers by low-cost PCIe cables, take the place of network adapters in the servers and top-of-rack switches.
The PCIe cards in the appliance operate Ethernet, iSCSI, NAS, or Fibre Channel connections. Each server thinks it has its own network adapter, while the vNET I/O Maestro controls the flow through the PCIe cards. This architecture allows for industry standard device drivers to run on the servers and industry standard PCIe network adapters to be placed, transparently to the servers, in the vNET appliance. This maintains compatibility across Operating Systems, applications, storage and network infrastructures.
Systems can be maintained, upgraded or repaired without downtime, because vNET’s hot-swappable network adapter interfaces. This greatly reduces operating costs and maintains service levels.
In an acquisition cost analysis provided by NextIO, a system using conventional Top-of-Rack switches and network adapters in each of 60 servers, is compared to a system that uses two VNET appliances with four dual port 10Gb Ethernet two dual port 8Gb Fibre Channel adapters to be shared between the servers. The $534,600 acquisition cost of the conventional installation is compared to the $303,062 acquisition cost of the vNET equivalent, a net saving of $231,538. Savings included switches, adapters cards and host bus adapters and cables ($279,600) versus the vNET appliances and cables ($108,062). An additional $60,000 is saved by 1U servers in the vNET configuration versus 4U servers in the conventional installation.
Our Take:
The vNET appliance has many advantages over other virtualization schemes in that expensive network adapters and switches are eliminated. Data center sprawl is greatly reduced, and operating expenses are slashed by elimination of hundreds of adapters and fabric switches. NextIO has years of experience in resource sharing appliances with the innovative hot-swappable I/O Modules. The vNET joins the NextIO family of vSTOR and VCORE appliances which allow flash card and GPU sharing.
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