Virtual I/O: It’s not just for virtualization any more. Servers that are not virtualized may gain significant cost and performance benefits as well, if they’re I/O-intensive and connectivity-heavy.

Nothing fills those criteria better than an Oracle environment.

Oracle’s I/O requirements (storage, networking and cluster communication) conspire to drive up cost and complexity. I/O bottlenecks must be eliminated to ensure application performance. (Which, of course, is why Oracle is a strong proponent of the InfiniBand interconnect.) So how exactly does virtual I/O help? Join this webcast to find out.

• Title: Five Ways Virtual I/O Boosts Oracle Performance and Scalability
• Date: Available on demand
• Duration: 45 min

To view the recording: Click here

Xsigo has numerous customers running Oracle on virtual I/O (read about a few of them here). In this webcast Ariel Cohen (CTO of Xsigo) and I will discuss some of the key reasons why:

- Simplifying and consolidating I/O
- Faster cluster communications
- Eliminating storage bottlenecks
- Easier change management

Xsigo virtual I/O is built on an InfiniBand fabric, the same cluster interconnect used by Oracle in their high-end systems. And with Xsigo that fabric can serve multiple duties to simplify and accelerate all I/O, in addition to serving the needs of the cluster.

Join us to learn more and get your questions answered live.

Presenters:

Ariel Cohen, PhD, CTO of Xsigo and Jon Toor, VP of Marketing, Xsigo

To view the recording: Click here

Oracle VM, a hypervisor growing in popularity, is now supported by Xsigo. Open solutions are core to the Xsigo value, and Xsigo now supports hypervisors from VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and Oracle. (It also bears repeating that Oracle is a big proponent of the InfiniBand fabric for the latency and bandwidth benefits it provides, and actually owns a stake in IB technology provider Mellanox.)

Benefits for OVM users are:

• Predictable Application Performance: Quality of service controls give customers guaranteed bandwidth – over both Ethernet and Fibre Channel – to specific virtual machines.  Shared resource environments can now achieve the same performance assurances as traditional, hard-wired server I/O.
• Development to Staging to Production, Without Disruption: Customers can move a server or specific virtual machine from one physical network to another without re-cabling. A user need only direct the server’s traffic to another external port on the Xsigo I/O Director.  Network isolation is now possible without relying on VLANs.
• Less Latency: Server-to-server communications benefit from the high-speed and low-latency switching of Xsigo’s underlying InfiniBand or Ethernet fabrics. By sending information from one vNIC to another, entirely within the Xsigo virtual I/O environment, servers move traffic over links with bandwidth up to 40Gbps each, using standard TCP/IP protocols.
• Lower Server Cost and Reduced Power Consumption: Fewer I/O cards and external switch ports means less power consumption for customers, saving up to 100 watts per server.
• Centralized I/O Management: Customers can manage I/O across all servers from a single pane-of-glass, greatly simplifying I/O configuration replication and migration.

How do Oracle users gain from virtual I/O? Turns out there are several ways they win.

Xsigo today announced a group of Xsigo virtual I/O customers (read the press release here) who now deploy Xsigo in support of their Oracle database applications: HiFX, a foreign-exchange broker; CARFAX, a vehicle history information provider; Bitbrains, a managed service provider; and Investec, a specialist bank and asset manager. The reasons they cite for using virtual I/O fall into three categories:

Performance: These users consistently cite faster job completion as one benefit. This group was also an early adopter of Xsigo’s 40Gb InfiniBand interface, so it’s not too surprising they saw great performance. There’s no doubt that DB applications can be I/O intensive, and eliminating the server connection as a bottleneck can only help. Oracle themselves use the InfiniBand interface in their own products, and Oracle owns 10% of InfiniBand supplier Mellanox. They clearly see IB as a means to make their own products run faster.

Complexity: Oracle requires multiple I/O connections per server, an issue that grows in magnitude when you run Oracle on a virtualized platform. Multiple Xsigo customers run Oracle on VMware or OVM, resulting in a large number of I/O connections. Xsigo consolidates the I/O for greater simplicity, software-controlled I/O management, and more flexibility to run apps on any host.

Cost: Reducing complexity reduces costs in some obvious ways (fewer cards, cables, and switch ports), but can also reduce costs in a less obvious way: equipment utilization. Because workloads can be more easily moved around with virtual I/O, one Xsigo user, HiFX, found they could make their second site serve double duty. The site can both handle normal workloads and can be quickly reconfigured as a DR site, thus eliminating the need for a dedicated DR facility.

These reasons are all similar to benefits seen by virtualization users, which highlights the versatility of the I/O virtualization environment.