3Leaf Systems Releases Virtual I/O Server

V-8000 delivers mainframe-class capabilities for commodity servers

• By James E. Powell
• 05/01/2007

3Leaf Systems introduced the 3Leaf Systems V-8000 Virtual I/O Server, which can virtualize the I/O subsystems for large pools of servers, delivering mainframe-class availability and reducing capital and maintenance costs.

The V-8000’s maximizes server resource utilization and scalability, enabling faster deployment and provisioning of new servers and offering centralized management. Capital expenditures can be reduced by over 50 beginning on the day a V-8000 is deployed; the company claims that operations costs can be reduced by nearly 60 percent.

The V-8000 delivers scalable I/O connectivity for servers residing in the 3Leaf Virtual Compute Environment (VCE), which can provide highly scalable and efficient I/O and removes the need for local networking and storage. According to 3Leaf, “the servers are stateless, commodity nodes that efficiently connect to virtual Network Interface Cards, virtual Host Bus Adapters, and virtual disks through the V-8000.” Such I/O consolidation uses fewer connections to the data and storage networks supporting the VCE, reducing capital and operating costs.

“Traditional scale-out server architectures, when installed and managed on a large scale, have a very high total cost of ownership, due to the physical complexities of configuring and connecting so many servers and the amount of time required for initial provisioning and reprovisioning,” said Mike Kahn, managing director of The Clipper Group, in a statement. “3 Leaf Systems' Virtual Compute Environment changes all of that while also improving the scalability, effective capacity, and availability of the underlying servers. Their approach makes a lot of sense!”

V-8000 features and benefits include:

Faster Server Deployment: The V-8000 enables fast deployment of new servers by allowing servers to be defined in advance, so spare nodes can have new profiles applied in just a few minutes instead of days or weeks. Network and storage interfaces can be pre-allocated to these profiles.

Improved I/O Resource Utilization: I/O resources can be allocated using quality-of-service parameters, “which delivers limits and guarantees to both networking and storage interfaces, allowing service levels to be dynamically modified as application demand changes,” the company said. The result is improved utilization of I/O resources and efficient running of priority applications.

High Availability: The V-8000, along with the VCE, are highly resiliency because they reduce the number of components (including local discs, excess network and storage adapters, and switch ports). Software infrastructure is more efficient because fewer drivers result in less downtime. In case of a failure, the V 8000 automatically fails over to a redundant V-8000 with redundant networking and storage interfaces, and the unit has built-in redundancy for storage and networking and can automatically discover redundant storage paths and join redundant networking paths.

For more information, visit http://www.3leafsystems.com or call 408-572-5900.