Xsigo Systems' flagship offering is the Xsigo I/O Director (VP780 x2), an I/O virtualization platform targeted to I/O and cable intensive data center deployments.

In a nutshell, the Xsigo platform virtualizes a server's I/O connectivity to LAN or storage resources. In a Xsigo-powered system, instead of requiring direct physical connections from a server to each I/O resource, each server instead sports a single 20 Gig InfiniBand connection (with a specialized Xsigo driver) to a central 4U I/O Director chassis, which in turn houses multiple I/O modules that provide the physical connections to the actual LAN and storage resources. The Director provisions and manages virtual NIC and/or HBA interfaces (up to 32 of each; 64 total per PC) on the connected servers via their drivers, such that those servers can use the virtual interfaces to communicate with the physical resources available to the Director in a transparent manner--the vendor notes that the virtual interfaces are transparent both to the network and storage resources (i.e., they appear as servers) and to the servers themselves (they appear as standard NICs/HBAs connected to physical infrastructure). In other words, the physical 20 Gb InfiniBand connection from the servers to the director is transparent to both sides of the communication; which see only LAN/SAN resources or Ethernet/FC hosts, respectively.

Because the NICs and HBAs utilized by the servers are virtual, they can be re-provisioned and configured without having to reboot the servers that use them. Further, the virtual NICs and HBAs can be migrated among physical machines, with the vendor noting that MAC/WMM settings remain persistent throughout the migration. Such virtual reconfigurations and migrations, according to the vendor, can be accomplished in 30 seconds without hardware resets.

Primary components of the Xsigo platform include the 20 Gb InfiniBand card and cable from the server(s) to the director (dual cards can be deployed in the servers for redundancy if desired); the Xsigo driver that is deployed to each server itself and facilitates the transparent communications between the servers and the Director; the 4U Director itself; and the physical interface modules that can be loaded within the Director. An additional expansion module allows the connection of more servers to each Director (more below).

The 4U Director is managed via a Web GUI or CLI, and supports connectivity for up to 24 servers (each through a 20 Gb InfiniBand port) and the loading of up to 15 I/O modules for physical connectivity to the LAN/SAN. Available I/O modules include a 4 port GigE module, with the ability to deliver up to 64 virtual Ethernet NICs to servers; a 1 port 10 Gig Ethernet module with support for the delivery of up to 128 virtual NICs; a 2 port 4 Gb/sec FC interface supporting the delivery of up to 64 virtual HBAs; and an InfiniBand Interface Module that provides a single, additional server InfiniBand interface port. For the Ethernet and FC modules, 2 of the available virtual interfaces provided are dedicated to internal management.

An additional system component--the 1U IS24 Expansion Module--allows up to 23 additional servers to be connected to a single Director. The IS24 itself boasts 24 InfiniBand ports, and allows a single or multiple connections to be made between the expansion modules and the Director with automatic load balancing across multi-connections. In a typical expanded deployment, the vendor notes that 120 servers can be connected to a Director using six expansion switches; i.e., each expansion switch connects to 20 servers, while the other 4 ports of each expansion switch connect to the Director itself.

Other platform features include dynamic allocation of bandwidth between network/storage resources, hot swappable power supplies and fans, and an open management API on the Director.

New to the Xsigo platform is the second generation I/O Director, the VP780 x2 (in Beta as of this writing). The x2 doubles the connection bandwidth between the Director and the servers (using 20 Gb/sec InfiniBand connections instead of the 10 Gb/sec connections supported by the initial VP780), as well as enhances its management features with single screen displays of virtual machines, switches, and I/O. Other new features include the ability to monitor traffic stats provided via 3rd party tools, and support for SAN and iSCSI server boot-ups. 20 Gb/sec connectivity is also supported in the Expansion Module.

The Xsigo I/O Director is available now, with pricing starting at $30,000. Contact Xsigo Systems for further information.