Just had a very nice lunch at Boisdales in London’s finance district, with my old friend and ex BT colleague Chris Brandon now Technical Director at Xsigo. Chris took me through what Xsigo do and why they think they have something to say.
You will remember a few weeks back the Cisco California announcements and the launch of the partnership between EMC, Cisco and VMWare that is the Unified Computing Platform. Disentangling the news there were a couple of key messages that were important and relevant, one was the expanded RAM capability on Cisco blades and the second was Cisco’s collapse of the network, with SAN and LAN traffic sharing the same structures, using Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
Why is the collapse of the network important? VMWare’s VMotion product needs significant network bandwidth to operate across a cluster and Cisco leverage VMWare virtual network drivers and the Nexus FCoE and IP switch to create a single non blocking switch fabric that can operate at 10G Ethernet speeds. It also removes much of the heavy interrupt traffic that the VMWare hypervisor has to deal with, virtualizing it and as a result, improving the overall platform performance. Fantastic and as I said in my recent blog an important step forwards in building ever larger VMWare clusters.
Great if you buy into the Cisco model of the world but what about IBM, Dell, HP, Verari and other high density server equipment? Also what about the massive investment in 6500 series switches that need to be fork-lifted out and replaced with new FCoE aware Nexus 5000 range kit?
Xsigo have been quietly delivering virtual and collapsed SAN and LAN for four and a half years supporting Linux, Windows, Citrix, XEN, Solaris, Hyper-V and VMWare. They can do it with all types of hardware including IBM, HP and Dell using open standards. Existing switch fabrics work and fiber based SANs can be integrated seamlessly.
Cool stuff and worth a look as a serious alternative to Cisco.
Trackback by VM Digest on 11 May 2009:
Is there an alternative to the Cisco UCP that enables LAN and SAN … http://bit.ly/LT9bD
Comment by meh130 on 17 July 2009:
This is deceptive. There is no more requirement to “forklift out” Catalyst 6500s to use Nexus 5000 FCoE than there is with Xsigo InfiniBand. Both the Nexus 5000 with FCoE and the InfiiBand Xsigo with the InfiniBand vHBA storage protocol replace the access layer FC and Ethernet switching infrastructure. Existing access layer Catalyst 6500s (in either case) can be reprovisioned to the distribution tier.
There is no disruption to existing distribution and core Ethernet infrastructure, and no disruption to core FC SAN director infrastructure in either case.
The value prop for either solution is similar. The difference is, Cisco uses Ethernet as the transport, IP over Ethernet as the IP protocol, and FC as the storage protocol. Xsigo uses InfiniBand as the transport, vNIC (a mix of IP over InifiniBand and Sockets Direct Protocol over InfiniBand) as the IP protocol, and vHBA as the storage protocol. vHBA is a newer storage protocol than the more mature SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) or iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER). vHBA will likely be replaced with Fibre Channel over InfiniBand (FCoIB), which is being championed by InfiniBand silicon vendor Mellanox due to the industry momentum behind FCoE. The transition to FCoIB will likely be disruptive, requiring new drivers on the servers and new firmware on the I/O Directors. Perhaps Xsigo will not embrace FCoIB, but it is likely FCoIB will become a preferred storage protocol for InfiniBand, as Mellanox is the only vendor of InfiniBand host channel adapter cards.
The last time I checked, the Xsigo I/O director was not in EMC's support matrix, while the Nexus 5000 with FCoE was. The other advantage of an Ethernet solution like the Nexus 5000 is it also natively supports existing IP storage protocols like CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI.
Comment by thehotaisle on 18 July 2009:
Thank you for your reply, informative and useful.
Steve
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