Comments on: Next Up: I/O Virtualization?

By: Virtualized I/O Takes Cloud Computing to the Next Level

Virtualized I/O Takes Cloud Computing to the Next Level — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:53:15 +0000

[...] reliability (that means it can go down 53 minutes each year), said today it will save $1 million by virtualizing its network and will spend 50 percent less to deliver its high reliability cloud. The company has installed [...]

By: Technical blogs with pictures and videos » Xsigo Raises Money for Virtual I/O

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:01:49 +0000

[...] Byers, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners to support sales of its I/O virtualization appliance. Several filings submitted to the California Department of Securities show that back in [...]

By: Xsigo Raises Money for Virtual I/O

Xsigo Raises Money for Virtual I/O — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:05:18 +0000

By: Kennyo

Kennyo — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:52:03 +0000

The very cool part of I/O virtualization isn't the fact that it interoperates with all of the other (redundant?) transfer mechanisms, or that it makes it "easy to connect the VM" to different resources... although that's part of it.

The thing that's valueable is that when one provisions a piece of software to a piece of hardware (whether-or-not it's been virtualized) one can provision a "virtual NIC" at the same time.

So picture the future: software, I/O, and presumably storage, can be allocated on-the-fly as compute demands dictate. Very much of an automated "cloud" scenario.

By: Richard

Richard — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 06:14:29 +0000

The summary in 2nd paragraph is confusing, and makes it sounds as if this is something like a SAN technology – as far as I can tell from the links, this is simply a way for multiple PCI Express cards in a single system to be allocated to separate virtual machines. The I/O virtualization part presumably makes it easy to connect a VM to different I/O resources, although SANs already do that so it’s hard to see the value of this.

By: GaryO

GaryO — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:32:55 +0000

Great to see GigaOm covering more data center infrastructure!

In addition to the folks mentioned delivering sophisticated path management, there are also companies trying to minimize the impact of application I/O requests by applying memory at the server, network, and storage layers, and delivering a "virtual I/O" response.

But more importantly, how the heck did we go from: 1. We have Ethernet to 2. We have Ethernet and Fibre Channel to 3. We have Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InifiniBand to 4. We can put everything back on 10Gig Ethernet.

Is it just me, or does this seem like we could have saved a few billion dollars over the last few years and skipped a couple of steps?