The firms will converge their data center connectivity products for linking servers, storage solutions, fabric switches, and related software.

Xsigo, the I/O specialist for intensively virtualized environments, has upped the ante with its I/O Director to 40 gigabits per second (Gbps) I/O per physical server. It was previously limited to 20 Gbps. That means 15 virtual machines (VMs) running on a server could be connected to both networking and storage through I/O Director, with one mission-critical VM assigned a high allotment of 10 Gbps of bandwith, while the others would still have over 2 Gbps each, with all traffic traveling over an...

QLogic this week unveiled its third-generation 10Gbps adapters that feature, among other capabilities, concurrent protocol processing and ‘switch agnostic' virtual machine communication.

Thanks to x86 server virtualization and its follow-on technologies, the state-of-the-art enterprise data center looks vastly different than it did even a year ago.

Ethernet is the networking protocol of choice in the enterprise, a fact that is not likely to change any time soon. And yet, some are wondering whether the rise of cloud computing might lead many large enterprises to consider deploying an even faster

By Ken Oestreich

I've been doing an analysis regarding how "complexity" has evolved in the datacenter. Fundamentally, just why is it so hard to configure & provision new (physical) servers? Why is clustering inherently so complex? Why do we have data networks, storage networks and management networks (all distinct, I might add). How come we have all of these layered management systems? [..]

Startup produces combined, high speed I/O switches for virtual machine hosts.

Arista Networks is introducing software that retains network state and policy across any kind of network infrastructure -- physical, virtual or cloud.

Cisco's dominance in enterprise switching is legend, but HP and 3Com have put together compelling product portfolios and value stories that add up to the first real competition the switch king has faced in years, and buyers are beginning to pay attention.

Virtualization implementers found that the key bottleneck to virtual machine density is memory capacity; now there's a whole new slew of servers coming out with much larger memory footprints, removing memory as a system bottleneck. Cloud computing negates that bottleneck by removing the issue of machine density from the equation-sorting that out becomes the responsibility of the cloud provider, freeing the cloud user from worrying about it.