Virtualizing the I/O layer

Hardware and software virtualization are old hat at this point, thanks to VMware, Hyper-V, Softricity/SoftGrid, Altiris and many others in those spaces. So, lacking anything else new in those areas, some vendors have decided to hype the virtualization of the I/O layer, focusing on the "virutalization" of ethernet and SAN connectivity. I found an article/post about the topic from last week that talks about a couple vendors, 3Leaf and Xsigo, but neither the article nor the vendors are particularly up front on what they are actually doing. Their products are InfiniBand switches, plain and simple.

Don't get me wrong - I love the InfiniBand concept. But seeing these new vendors popping up with their "new" technologies is rather silly in many ways. InfiniBand basically extends the PCI plane from the server to a switch via a 10 Gbit connection. In the switch you can have multiple connections out to various other services, most commonly Ethernet NICs and Fiber Channel SAN connections. InfiniBand is getting more interesting now that the wiring and standards for the 10 Gbit connections are pretty easy and common, and also since 4 Gbit SAN connections are available, but it definitely isn't new technology. Cisco has been selling InfiniBand switches for at least 3 years, and the protocol goes back older than that.

Of course, the fact that the technology has been around a while actually is a good thing when looking to evaluate it, either in the form of these new vendors or from an established player like Cisco. Instead of multiple switches for each topology, everything runs from the server to the switching infrastructure on a single InfiniBand connection (two, for redundancy, if you're into that). Instead of installing various drivers to support all the hardware there is a single driver for the InfiniBand card. And from the InfiniBand switch you can provision multiple NICs and multiple HBAs on a server, all through the one InfiniBand connection. It will definitely reduce cabling complexities and provisioning time, so those are both good things.

Definitely an interesting technology to take a look at again, but also most definitely not new.