* Xsigo's I/O Director to be paired with the full lineup of Dell enterprise hardware
One of the coolest deals happened this week in the storage arena. I/O virtualization vendor Xsigo teamed up with Dell to expand Dell’s data center offerings. In addition to reselling Xsigo’s I/O Director, Dell will also collaborate with the company on technology roadmaps and channel resources.
The I/O Director will be paired with the full line of Dell products – PowerEdge servers, PowerVault storage, EqualLogic iSCSI storage and Dell/EMC branded storage.
The I/O Director lets IT managers manage I/O resources from a single console instead of siloed interconnects. It eliminates physical I/O ports and allows users to easily deploy servers and storage on demand.
In a typical system, a server may contain two Fibre Channel adapters for connection to storage, two Ethernet adapters for attachment to the network and perhaps two InfiniBand adapters for connecting servers together into clusters. The I/O Director allows an IT manager to organize this ‘spaghetti mess’ of cables and when they add a new server into the environment, to connect it easily, without the massive array of cables that would have been required.
The I/O Director consolidates the physical network and replaces network adapters and host bus adapters with ‘virtually’ wired resources that can be deployed on the side. The benefits of this approach are less time managing the cabling infrastructure, less power consumption from network adapters and host bus adapters, 70% fewer I/O adapters, cables and switch ports.
The I/O Director is priced at about $30,000 and is available now from Dell as well as Xsigo.
