Xsigo Systems, Inc., the data centre fabric deployment and technology leader, today announced the general availability of the Xsigo Data Centre Fabric product line. The new product line features improved hardware and software products currently used in 300 fabric deployments.
“Today’s announcement is in response to a sharp uptake in demand for complete, vendor-neutral fabric solutions,” said Lloyd Carney, CEO of Xsigo. “Unlike closed systems from companies like Cisco, our open approach is the most cost-effective way to move to a fabric architecture because only Xsigo lets data centre managers use existing server, virtualisation, and storage equipment and gives them the freedom to choose the best vendor in the future.”
Recent Xsigo fabric deployments include a 55,000 seat VDI fabric at Royal Bank of Scotland by Fujitsu and a large enterprise public cloud deployment by Canadian telecommunications giant TELUS
“As enterprises move to virtualised data centres and cloud architectures, traditional network architecture and operations are increasingly becoming bottlenecks,” said Mark Fabbi, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Fabric technologies are designed to overcome these problems and by delivering a more flexible infrastructure that can quickly adapt to changing business and application demands.”
Xsigo Data Centre Fabric is the only open fabric solution designed to work with equipment from all server, storage, and virtualisation vendors. The primary products in the new line consist of:
Xsigo Fabric Director – hardware and software solution to build fabrics using both 10G Ethernet or InfiniBand. Supports Fibre Channel connections to existing SANs;
Xsigo Fabric Manager – Software Defined Network (SDN) solution to manage all I/O connections in a data centre from a single graphical interface. Works with X86 servers, storage, and network equipment from multiple vendors using an open, standards-based architecture;
Xsigo Fabric Accelerator – software solution to manage both Ethernet and Fibre Channel traffic within the Xsigo fabric
New features of the Xsigo Data Centre Fabric product line include:
Support for all five major hypervisors: Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle Virtual Machine, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation, and VMware vSphere;
Support for new generation of servers optimised for virtualised data centres: HP Gen 8, Dell 12th Generation, and IBM M4 series servers;
Improved connectivity with up to 56 Gbps server-to-server communications using InifiniBand and a new 4 x 10Gb Ethernet module;
New software performance manager to optimise data centre efficiency.
“As the world’s leading risk-consulting company, Kroll Factual Data supplies timely, accurate information to our clients hundreds of thousands of times a day,” said Russ Donnan, CIO of Kroll Factual Data. “We depend on the Xsigo Data Centre Fabric to provide a fast, highly reliable platform so we can deliver a great user experience while getting the greatest possible efficiency from our Microsoft Hyper-V servers.”
“dinCloud’s hosted virtual desktop services have run on the Xsigo Data Centre Fabric from the start,” said Saad Shahzad, Chief Strategy Officer at dinCloud. “Through our cloud transformation process, our customers get the user experience of a local computer at an unbeatable price, a performance vs. cost equation that Xsigo’s revolutionary architecture helps us to deliver.”
“Xsigo Data Centre Fabric enabled Farrer and Company to deploy a Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture and move away from an inflexible hardwired solution,” said Andy Beech, IT operations manager at Farrer and Company. “Prior to Xsigo, each server had direct attached storage and ran a specific application. With Xsigo, we can now quickly match resources to workloads.”
“We love our Xsigo products, which help us connect our systems with speed and pricing competitors can only dream of,” said Dan Shipley, architect at Supplies Network. “At the same time, we enjoy the only open, standards-based fabric available, and it has been proven in extremely large installations. Add on the superior Xsigo support and ease of use, and their products can’t be beat.”
“Xsigo Data Centre Fabric is an integral part of our High Performance IaaS cloud and continues to enable us to offer our customers the fastest possible performance at lower cost than our competitors who employ expensive proprietary gear, whilst maintaining the high levels of security and segregation demanded by the Financial Services Industry," said Gjalt van Rutten, CTO of Bitbrains. “With the Xsigo Data Centre Fabric Bitbrains is able to lead the industry in cost and flexibility.”