Across industries, organizations are working with Xsigo to drive cost savings and data center agility.

Financial Institutions

Top banks and brokerage firms in the US and UK are working with Xsigo to address the most compelling issues in their data centers. These highly dynamic environments are characterized by hundreds or thousands of applications deployed across tens of thousands of servers. For these customers, benefits of the Xsigo solution include:

• Data center agility: In the data centers of financial firms, application requirements change constantly. New market conditions create opportunities that demand fast response. New technologies spawn new ways of doing things, and often drive increased demand for servers in the process. Xsigo helps by providing a fluid, seamlessly flexible management tool that removes the constraints of server I/O. Servers are easier to deploy, applications become easier to migrate. The whole environment becomes more efficient, which enables IT managers to accomplish more with the resources they have.
  
  
• Scalable I/O for cluster computing: Monte Carlo simulations and large-scale arbitrage calculations require server clusters that can grow to 1,000 nodes or beyond. Often these clusters are interconnected with InfiniBand, capitalizing on the low latency and high bandwidth of this interface. In this setting, the Xsigo system provides high-speed I/O connectivity to both networking and storage. The Xsigo system ties seamlessly into the InfiniBand fabric (Xsigo employs InfiniBand as its server interconnect), and provides virtual connectivity (NICs and HBAs) to all attached servers without additional cabling and cards.

Service Providers

Leading service providers in the US, UK, and Japan are working with Xsigo to drive increased flexibility and added value for their organizations:

• Capital cost savings: Xsigo can cut server I/O capital costs in half. By reducing the need for cards, switches, routers, and cables, Xsigo can reduce this significant infrastructure cost. For service providers, where infrastructure costs significantly drive overall costs, the opportunity to save is compelling.
  
  
• Virtual machine connectivity: Service providers now deploy virtual machines to increase resource utilization and flexibility. Xsigo enhances these virtual machine deployments in three ways:
  
  
• Superior bandwidth: Xsigo provides 10Gb of bandwidth to each server. This bandwidth that can be dynamically allocated to either network or storage requirements, hence delivering far greater effective bandwidth than is available with separate FC and Ethernet connections.
  
  
• Quality of Service: Bandwidth to each application can be controlled through Xsigo’s QoS features. Critical applications receive guaranteed bandwidth. Less critical applications can be throttled to ensure they do not consume excess resources.
  
  
• Enhanced security: Connectivity can be assigned to specific virtual machines, ensuring exclusive access to storage and networking resources.
  
  
• Built-in flexibility: With Xsigo, SLAs can be quickly scaled simply by migrating applications among servers. Xsigo helps keep this operation transparent to network and storage resources.

Enterprise

Fortune 500 companies in verticals including retail and transportation are working with Xsigo to help reduce data costs and drive up efficiency. Benefits for these customers include:

• Agility: Critical tasks that address availability, efficiency, and performance become simpler to manage and therefore more achievable with Xsigo. Examples include:
  
  
• Server sparing: Use one server to back up multiple servers.
  
  
• Application migration: Transparently move applications to boost utilization.
  
  
• Server deployment: Deploy or repurpose servers faster to more quickly accommodate business needs.
  
  
• Labor savings: Xsigo helps IT managers work more efficiently by allowing simple jobs to be completed by fewer people. A server swap or application migration can, for example, be completed by the server group alone, rather than burdening the networking and storage groups with every modification.
  
  
• Resource utilization: Just as virtual servers drive up server utilization, virtual I/O increases connectivity utilization. The result is fewer SAN and LAN ports, less equipment, and better efficiency.