The folks behind PrimaCloud, a cloud computing and storage product that offers a service-level agreement that it claims delivers 99.99 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 boxes from Xsigo Systems that sit between the servers and switches and create a cloud through which the network traffic from the virtual machines loaded on the servers is routed. The network can handle traffic destined for other servers or for the storage network without requiring separate cables.

This, combined with gear from Sun’s Fishworks effort, has allowed PrimaCloud to virtualize its storage, networking and hardware — saving it money and boosting reliability said Eric Novikoff, COO of Enki, which built PrimaCloud. The completely virtualized computing infrastructure, and creations of these three clouds, is an example of the next big change sweeping computing. Most clouds right now rely on virtualized hardware and some virtualized storage — virtualized networks are the next focus.

Novikoff said PrimaCloud couldn’t fully utilize its servers because of I/O limitations — each virtual machines only had access to so much bandwidth on each server. When that bandwidth was tapped out, even if the server wasn’t fully utilized, the machine had reached its limit. After virtualizing the I/O and using data center orchestration software from Enigmatec, Novikoff said when I/O limits were reached the job moved over to a new machine automatically. He was also able to allocate more bandwidth per server, so it became less necessary to move jobs around that often.