The I/O bottleneck issue has posed a significant roadblock to IT teams such as the one at logistics services company Transplace, where CTO Vincent Biddlecombe recently told CIO.com that he's running all of the company's significant applications on virtual machines except the Microsoft Exchange server and SQL databases—those applications are so I/O intensive. Similarly, the I/O bottleneck is one reason that many IT groups have shied away from running SAP applications, often among the most mission-critical at enterprises, on VMs.

A slew of startup vendors, such as CiRBA and Akorri, have also tackled the resource-balancing problem with new virtualization management tools in the past year. (See "Ten Virtualization Vendors to Watch".) No wonder: In CIO's recent survey on enterprise use of virtualization, 64 percent of IT leaders called balancing server workloads and maintaining application service levels their top challenge to virtualization success. IT leaders cited this as the biggest headache by far.

Neterion has also been playing a part in an emerging industry-standard, called SR-IOV 1.0 (Single-Root I/O Virtualization), that came out of a PCI-SIG workgroup. Neterion's new 10GB Ethernet adapters, which work with all the major OSes, hypervisors and server architectures, are among the first products to ship that will adhere to that standard, Zabrowski says.

© 2009 CXO Media Inc.