Storage News

Aprius Ethernet-Based I/O Virtualization for Storage, Networking

Aprius announced the availability of its technology platform for I/O Virtualization, a solution that the company claims offers a simple approach for I/O provisioning and management. As stated in the company's press release on PR-USA, the Aprius technology provides many data center servers access to PCI Express (PCIe) I/O resource pools over a standard layer-2 Ethernet network, extending the servers across all network, storage and peripheral resources via a single Ethernet connection.

"The Aprius technology connects up to 32 servers via 10GbE to a shared 'pool' of PCIe slots that are virtualized and presented to a server as many virtual devices. The greatest amount of virtualization and sharing within the Aprius technology is achieved by deploying SR-IOV compliant cards, although the PCIe slots can accept any standard PCIe cards, such as Fibre Channel HBAs, SAS storage controllers, NICs, PCIe Flash storage devices and co-processor cards.

"'Server virtualization has moved from simply consolidating physical servers and delivering the economic benefits of increased server utilization, to an enabler of a more dynamic, mobile server infrastructure,' said Luca Bert, director of DAS RAID architecture and strategic planning, LSI. 'While planning for LSI server storage products, we believe that the next virtualization wave will focus on creating a much more dynamic infrastructure around the server, including the dynamic provisioning of I/O resources. Hardware-based SR-IOV support in host adapter cards and I/O Virtualization systems from vendors such as Aprius help achieve that goal.'"