After finding it difficult to get our hands on Xsigo kit for some interopability testing with various infiniband enabled servers, last year we decided it was going to be worth investing in our own unit.
The VP560 is a Virtual I/O director, and enables infrastructure administrators to ’slice n’ dice’ network connectivity to either bare metal servers or Virtual Hosts - in a similar way to how a SAN enables you to provision storage.
For instance - if you suddenly had the urge to add four network cards to a server, say 2 X 4Gb, 1 X 1Gb and 5 X 100Mb with the VP560 - this task can be done in a few clicks.
Likewise, if you wanted to move a network adapter from one bit of bare metal hardware to another - again it’s a case of a few clicks.
The ’old school’ way would involve a trip to the data center, downtime, hardware issues, resource issues - and generally much pain.
On top of the benefits of amazing flexibility of I/O provisioning - the VP560 uses Infiniband (IB), a technology which vastly out performs standard Ethernet. Access times for IB based systems are typically in the region of 4 micro seconds - with 1 millisecond being 1,000 micro seconds! The frame sizes used for IB are also far larger. These two facts means that IB enabled system can move more data, faster.
However IB can be tricky from a hardware and OS compatibility perspective, so because of this - you can perform interoperability testing on our unit, either here, or on loan at your place.
This technology really has to be seen to be believed, so why not book yourself a slot with us to see it in person?
Just make sure you bring a cup for your eyes - because they will probably pop out.
