Xsigo pushes server fabric pill for cable and adaptor bloat

Venture capital-funded startup Xsigo is looking to its latest Data Centre Fabric (DCF) version to become its killer product. The kit is aimed at bloated data centres, where it will remove network cable and adapter sprawl and channel I/O to servers running any of five hypervisors across a 56gig InfiniBand link.

The idea is that as physical servers and virtual machines multiply, so too do the network connections to them – the cables and adapters – leading to rack clutter and cabling hell. By plugging the connections into an intelligent fabric instead, they can be virtualised and shared between the servers and virtual machines.

The actual links needed across the fabric are defined by software. Xsigo's pitch is that its fabric – unlike Cisco's, for example – is open and, unlike HP's Virtual Connect, allows heterogeneous servers join in the fabric. Xsigo CEO Lloyd Carney said Xsigo's product "lets data centre managers use existing server, virtualisation, and storage equipment and gives them the freedom to choose the best vendor in the future.”