Flash storage arrays take center stage at Storage Decisions

Solid-state storage was a hot topic at the Storage Decisions Conference in Chicago last week, as expert presenters explained its benefits while warning attendees not to go overboard in deploying expensive flash storage arrays.

Presenters suggested instead using flash as a tool in a sound, economical storage strategy that also includes spinning hard disk drives, tape archiving and cloud services.

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NextIO shares I/O resources via PCIe virtualization approach

Within the shrinking I/O virtualization market, NextIO Inc., of Austin, Texas, has staked its claim on PCIe virtualization. The company’s V-series product line uses high-speed PCI Express technology instead of InfiniBand to consolidate and share I/O resources at the top of the rack. Read more

Amid shrinking I/O virtualization market, Xsigo I/O Director brings flexibility to IT shops

Virtual I/O, also known as I/O virtualization (IOV), hasn’t proven as popular yet as server virtualization or even storage virtualization. Most of the startups that offered the technology a few years ago are gone. Aprius Inc. and 3Leaf Systems went out of business, and Virtensys Ltd. was acquired by Micron Technology Inc. in January. At the time of the acquisition, Micron said it would use Virtensys’ PCIe virtualization technology to virtualize Micron’s solid-state drive (SSD) storage. That leaves Xsigo Systems Inc. and NextIO Inc. as dedicated I/O virtualization vendors, although larger vendors use the technology with networks running their servers and connectivity. Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Virtual Connect is an example of vendor-specific I/O virtualization. But while the options for I/O virtualization are dwindling, the need for it is not. Xsigo has been able to capitalize on the rise of virtualization in the data center and cloud computing as well as renewed interest in InfiniBand to gain traction with its Xsigo I/O Director, which connects x86 servers to any storage or network devices. Read more

Fusion-io drives I/O solid-state storage and memory to the operating system

Fusion-io today introduced its newest generation solid-state storage software stack, the ioMemory Virtual Storage Layer (VSL). Fusion-io characterizes the ioMemory VSL as a hybrid operating system subsystem that combines the block-level reading and writing benefits of an I/O subsystem with the virtual addressing benefits of a virtual memory subsystem.

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