Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

Aprius' Thompson Talks I/O Virtualization Benefits

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

(Editor's Note: This article refers to a video interview shot at Interop (News - Alert) 2010. To view TMCnet's entire library of videos from Interop and other industry shows, demonstrations and interviews in our in-house studio, visit our Video News home page.)

At the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) had a chance to interview Aprius's Craig Thompson, VP Product Marketing. A relatively new company, they're developing technology designed to address what Thompson called "a growing problem in the modern data center related to I/O bottlenecks, or I/O constraints."

Most people refer to this area as "I/O virtualization," Thompson said. "It is an emerging area, the basic concept being to apply the principles of virtualization to all of those network and storage connections a server normally would use."

Tehrani asked what are some of the benefits a busy data center could see from "going down the I/O virtualization path. Thompson said there are some major points to consider.

"First and foremost, a modern virtualized data center has a much different workload profile than data centers in the past. Virtual machines can now reside on any physical server, anywhere in the data center, and that's resulted in variable and peak work loads, that can be moved around within the data center."

The biggest problem has been that the underlying infrastructure that those servers use "hasn't become dynamic," he said. "So the technology's designed to provide, really, a much more dynamic underlying infrastructure."

This provides two or three key advantages, he noted. "One, it leads to a much more efficient I/O infrastructure - fewer cards, fewer cables, fewer switchports required to provide a server with all of the traffic needs that it has at a given time."

And secondly, "the I/O load is evenly matched to the virtual machine profile on a server at that particular time."

View the full video interview below (Apple (News - Alert) users click here):

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Patrick Barnard