Xsigo cuts Director down to size

I/O virtualisation specialist Xsigo Systems has scaled down its I/O Director product to meet the demand for a rack-based product. The VP560 I/O Director, has been designed specifically for private cloud infrastructures.

The VP560 I/O Director uses standardised rack-based computing architectures, or "pods," to enable easy implementation, the product is interoperable with a range of hardware and software technologies, claimed Xsigo. The products, which work by consolidating I/O resources and managing them more effectively, use a 2U form factor, for streamlined deployment.

"We've seen from the emergence of products like VBlock from VMware and Cisco that there's a demand for creating modular building blocks," said Jon Toor, VP of marketing at Xsigo. He said that they cut down deployment time down to days and provide a simple way to construct a rack.  "Accenture are building up these pods and sending them all over the world."

Torr stressed the open nature of the system. "The difference between us and other vendors is that everything is open, so we're totally interoperable." He said that the 560 would also provide immense time management savings for CIOs."It's priced at two-thirds of the price of the Director 780 but it's not two-thirds of the performance."

Features offered by the VP560 include full deployment of virtual Ethernet and Fibre channel connections to live servers; Scalable I/O; Up to 64 virtual NICs and HBAs per server with just one cable; 24 server ports: 20Gbps per server connection Four I/O module slots, configurable with 10G Ethernet, 1G Ethernet, and 4Gb Fibre Channel modules and support for seven virtualisation systems including ESX, Hyper-V, Windows Server and XenServer