I/O Virtualization - Enabling New Architectures in the Data Center for Server and I/O Connectivity

As Data Centers march towards more agility, it creates a need for treating all resources such as compute and I/O as flexible and separate pools. On the other hand, exciting technologies such as direct attached PCI-E Flash are emerging which promise to bridge the performance gap between compute and I/O thereby relieving the I/O bottleneck for applications. This talk will present I/O Virtualization as a technology that can fulfill the promise of agility by decoupling the CPU from the I/O subsystem while bringing the benefits of direct attached PCI-E devices to a shared environment. Such a technology will provide an order of magnitude boost in performance of current applications, open up new usage models in IT administration and create opportunities for innovative appliance architectures.

Learning Objectives

State of the art in server I/O virtualization architectures and the underlying technologies
Usage models and innovation opportunities with I/O Virtualized architectures
A look at the role of PCI-E based I/O virtualization on PCI-E SSDs