Xsigo- fast virtual IO

The folks over at Xsigo launched two new products today. A new I/O Director that offers sharply increased performance and Xsigo XMS 3.0 a virtual storage management tool. As in the past, these products appear to offer a number of attractive features to those needing accelerated virtual I/O to improve overall workload performance.

Here's what Xsigo has to say about their new offerings

With the new Xsigo I/O Director, Xsigo now offers a range of server I/O speeds -- from 10Gbps to 40Gbps -- to meet a full range of operational requirements. Compared to Xsigo's current I/O Directors, the new product delivers 2X the bandwidth capacity to ensure a predictable user experience, even during periods of high demand. The increased throughput helps customers to run more virtual machines per server, run I/O intensive applications such as database and Microsoft Exchange, and gain predictable performance by eliminating I/O bottlenecks.

The second product, the Xsigo XMS 3.0, offers a number of unique features specifically designed for the demands of large-scale server management:

• User-defined I/O templates: the unique ability to roll out or modify connectivity on thousands of servers in seconds;
• Unified connectivity management: the ability to deploy, view and manage connectivity on thousands of servers from a single pane of glass;
• Performance monitoring: lets users monitor and manage I/O performance across all servers to quickly identify and remedy I/O bottlenecks, as well as identify underutilized I/O resources to help increase efficiency;
• Simplified disaster recovery: wide-area I/O management lets users manage and migrate I/O across sites to simplify disaster recovery, move entire I/O identities from one site to another, and recreate an entire configuration at a remote site so applications can be back up and running in minutes.
• iPad accessible: the new management interface can be accessed through an iPad. With the touch of a finger, users can create and manage data center server I/O using drag-and-drop features. To view a demo, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DxTcxmkj0k.

Snapshot analysis

Quite often organizations address a workload performance issue by replacing the system with one offering more overall performance. Although this often has the desired effect, an accelerated workoad, this approach may be much more costly than really necessary.  If they took the time to more closely examine the environment, they usually find that the processor is not the bottleneck that believe it to be. Other factors, taken together, usually are to blame.

Supplier such as Xsigo would point out that performance issues can be attributed to a number of causes and that depends upon the application design. Distributed applications often find network throughput or latency to be the problem. Database-based applications are held back by storage subsystem performance and  in-memory caches that are too small. Only poor performance in processing-intensive applications can be directly attributed to insufficient processing power.

By addressing the real problem, a significant, but less costly, performance boost can be implemented. Xsigo would point out that by changing one or a small number of components rather than a wholesale replacement of the entire system can offer accelerated application performance.

If storage subsystem performance is the bottleneck, Xsigo's technology might be of help.