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  5. Will There Ever Be A Right Time For IO Virtualization?: Page 3 of 3
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Will There Ever Be A Right Time For IO Virtualization?: Page 3 of 3

Last year, Xsigo and Dell announced a relationship where the server vendor would resell the IOV supplier's equipment. The move was expected to position Dell at the forefront of virtualization. However, difficulties in integrating IOV into servers cleanly and advances in bus and IO performance have done little to advance IOV outside of relatively niche situations like high performance computing, data modeling and animation rendering.
June 25, 2010

The larger market for IOV will be the standard enterprise data center this time next year, where performance will become less of an issue than compatibility, reliability and flexibility. "I would expect in the next 12-18 months that IOV would become part of any server configuration," says Von Voros.

Too move into the server, and ultimately onto the motherboard, IOV will need to find broad based adoption within the data center. This implies that a common, ubiquitous protocol will be used to base wide spread adoption for IOV. It is extremely unlikely that data center engineers will be interested in moving to InfiniBand throughout the data center for the sake of this technology. More likely IOV will succeed in the mainstream based on common standards like Ethernet and PCIe using the Single Root IOV system as laid out by the PCI special interest group, which will enable far smoother integration into the data center.

Aprius claims to meet those criteria, by supporting any standard PCIe card and supporting the card vendor's drivers as well as being based on Ethernet with 10GbE, used to connect their 'gateway' to the servers. The move positions Aprius to partner with Ethernet switch and infrastructure vendors who would normally reject an IOV solution based on Infiniband or required proprietary technology. Yet Aprius too faces its own challenges. The company has yet to ship working product while their competitors have been shipping equipment for some time. Even some of Aprius's major benefits are starting to change. In April, Xsigo announced a software change that allows its drivers to work with any card.

Although right now IOV may not appearing on the shopping list of most data center architects, that could change as server virtualization grows and the value of the technology becomes more apparent.

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