VirtenSys Ltd., a provider of next-generation I/O (input/output) solutions for data centers, announced on Thursday that its VIO 4000 I/O virtualization switches enable the deployment of high performance compute (HPC) clusters with ideal I/O price/performance and lowest energy usage.

The VIO 4000 switches consolidate, virtualize and share all the servers I/O resources within a rack. The switches deliver the full network and storage connectivity bandwidth to each server, while cutting I/O equipment cost in half and reducing energy consumption by more than 70 percent. The I/O virtualization switches are based on the native PCI Express (PCIe) server standards.

VirtenSys will demonstrate its solutions at Supercomputing 2009 (SC09) at the Oregon Convention Center, in Portland, Oregon.

The VIO 4000 switches consolidate, virtualize and share major types of server networking and storage connectivity, including Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), SAS/SATA and Fibre Channel, without requiring any changes to servers, networks, I/O adapters or management infrastructures.

Additionally, the VIO 4000 switches provide servers with low-latency and high-bandwidth inter-processor communication (IPC) for message passing utilizing PCIe interconnects, with no additional cost or performance overhead. Similarly, the switches provide applications with access to high-performance, low-latency and low-cost global shared memory (GSM) for high-speed data caching and processing. Large arrays of local shared solid state drives (SSD) are also available as raw storage for information logging and file sharing. No changes are required in servers, operating systems or applications to leverage these capabilities.

High-performance, low-cost, small footprint and low-power compute clusters can now be built within a single rack, using very compact and state-of-the-art commodity servers. Compute capacity and I/O resources within a cluster can be independently added, deleted and dynamically allocated depending on applications’ needs. Clusters I/O resources are also managed as a single entity, reducing management complexity and costs by more than 60 percent.

“We are very pleased to bring this capability to HPC customers. Our VIO 4000 switches are shipping now, and customers can immediately deploy computer clusters with the maximum server performance at the lowest cost and energy consumption levels,” said Ahmet Houssein, president and CEO at VirtenSys. “With IT budgets so tight, customers now have more dollars to spend on their compute resources. The demand we have received from customers has been phenomenal.”