Xsigo Makes Server Connectivity Child's Play For Action For Children; Reduced Cabling by 90%, Improved Performance, and Lowered Networking Costs with Xsigo Virtualised Infrastructure
[April 12, 2012]
Xsigo Makes Server Connectivity Child's Play For Action For Children; Reduced Cabling by 90%, Improved Performance, and Lowered Networking Costs with Xsigo Virtualised Infrastructure
(M2 PressWIRE Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) LONDON, UK, -- Xsigo Systems, Inc., the leader in virtualised data centre infrastructure, today announced that Action for Children, a UK charity that has been supporting the most vulnerable and neglected children for over 140 years, has reduced its server connectivity cost by 50%, cut data centre cabling footprint by 90% and accelerated server provisioning, thanks to Xsigo's data centre fabric technology.
Action for Children employs over 6,000 people working on nearly 480 projects across the UK, to support more than 50,000 of the most vulnerable and neglected children, young people and their families. In order to support its staff, the charity relies on a primary data centre located in the London Docklands, and a secondary site in Watford, Hertfordshire. In addition 400 remote locations are linked to the main data centre.
In 2011, a data centre relocation projected presented an opportunity to re-engineer the organisation's data centre infrastructure. On the objectives list was a simpler, more flexible design. Reducing the number of cables, switch ports and host adapter cards would increase efficiency and reduce acquisition and maintenance costs.
"We realised that if we stayed with Cisco, the cost of upgrading our cabling would have been extremely high and we would have been stuck with miles of legacy cabling. As a charity we need to ensure that we get the best value from all our resources and therefore we looked at other options," said Gareth Williams, Senior Infrastructure Security Analyst at Action for Children. "With Xsigo's infrastructure virtualisation technology we immediately reduced by 90% the number of cables needed to connect our servers. Now, when connectivity modifications are needed we no longer need to travel on-site to rewire because the links are virtualised."
Xsigo's technology offers the unique feature of carving each physical link into multiple virtual cables, immediately reducing the budget and resources spent on infrastructure acquisition, installation and maintenance when compared to traditional technologies. The Xsigo I/O Director quickly and easily attaches any server to any network or storage device, delivering up to 80Gb bandwidth to each server. With this technology, organisations can gain a 100X increase in management agility and a 15X improvement in application performance, while saving 30% to 70% in infrastructure costs.
Action for Children deployed two Xsigo I/O Directors to connect HP rack and blade servers to a Cisco 1Gb LAN and 15TB of NetApp storage via Fibre Channel. To manage server connectivity across all devices, the team has standardised on the Xsigo management interface.
"Using Xsigo's management interface we now create I/O templates and profiles to deploy network and storage connectivity wherever needed," Gareth continued. "It has dramatically simplified our whole environment for deployment and day-to-day management."
"A virtualised host can require sixteen or more I/O connections, which drives up connectivity costs and often demands larger, more expensive servers," said Chris Brandon, European Technical Director at Xsigo. "Xsigo allows users to fulfil their connectivity, redundancy, and bandwidth needs with just two cables per server, delivering an immediate CAPEX reduction. The Xsigo virtualized infrastructure helps deliver predictable application performance, eliminates hardware re-configuration when needs change, and centralises data centre connectivity management."
Gareth concluded, "We had just six months to complete our relocation project. Xsigo made the entire process, from testing to production, smooth and pain-free, allowing us to easily meet our deadline. We have now replaced all of the physical Fibre Channel storage connections within the servers as well as consolidating Ethernet networks using Xsigo. This has helped grow our datacentre virtualisation from 80% to 95%, and has allowed us to optimise efficiency wherever possible."
About Xsigo Systems
Xsigo Systems, Inc. is the leader in virtualised data centre infrastructure, helping enterprise customers increase application performance, reduce costs and improve business agility. Based on patented and award-winning technology, Xsigo offers a complete family of infrastructure virtualization products, including the Xsigo I/O Director and the Xsigo Server Fabric.
Xsigo has hundreds of customers, partners and resellers around the globe and services multiple industries including financial, education, government, entertainment, technology and telecommunications.
The privately held company, founded in 2004 and based in San Jose, Calif., is funded by Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Greylock Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. For more information, visit www.xsigo.com and follow Xsigo on Twitter at www.twitter.com/xsigo.
Federica Monsone A3 Communications - the networked storage PR specialists T: +44 (0) 1252 875 203 M: +44 (0) 7958 986 916 F: +44 (0) 870 762 8672 E: fred.monsone@a3communications.co.uk http://twitter.com/Fred_Monsone www.a3communications.co.uk
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