Dr. James Zhu, CIO of Alcatel Shanghai Bell in China, is planning to deploy a Xsigo I/O Director in his data center when it opens this June.

"The value we recognize is that the I/O Director can reduce our cabling and network interface card cost," Zhu says. "More importantly, we can change our server's I/O configuration without changing the network configuration and [in doing so] reduce our operating and capital expense costs."

Xsigo estimates that with a multi-core server that costs $6,000 and contains ten Gigabit Ethernet adapters and two Fibre Channel host bus adapters, powered by electricity that costs 17.5 cents per kilowatt hour, that the average user of an I/O Director will save over $379,000 on an initial investment of $780,000.

Upcoming 10GB Ethernet adapters from Neterion, set to debut in servers in the second half of 2008, should also help improve the I/O situation on servers running many virtual machines. These new Neterion X3100 Series products provide 17 independent I/O paths right in the adapter's silicon. This means the various VMs and applications won't have to fight for one swath of I/O bandwidth as they do today. Additional I/O bandwidth can be routed to applications when needed, with IT groups able to set quality of service (QoS) levels for different applications and borrow bandwidth when necessary, Neterion President Dave Zabrowski told CIO in a preannouncement briefing in February. The marketing lingo will be that the server has a "virtualized NIC (network interface card)" or "VNIC," he says.

© 2009 CXO Media Inc.