The Manchester based company with a development cetre in Beaverton, Oregon is developing virtualization systems that include software and semiconductors. Virtualization systems maximise the flow of data in and out of computer servers. Properly done, it cuts server and space costs, cuts energy usage, and allows companies to grow intensively data-driven businesses  without having to vastly expand their data centers.

"I am excited by the vote of confidence from our investors and by the breakthrough technology and unique solution that the VirtenSys team developed," said Ahmet Houssein, (right) CEO and president at VirtenSys.

"This funding round follows on the heel of successes at multiple server OEM customers and channel partners, and further signifies the general recognition of the VirtenSys I/O virtualization products as the industry's best price/performance and lowest energy-usage solutions for the I/O bottleneck in data centers.

Earlier this month, the company announced that its IOV switches support Ethernet, SAS/SATA and Fibre Channel, providing servers with the most economical and energy efficient connectivity to local area networks (LAN), and the storage infrastructures, including direct-attached storage (DAS) and storage area networks (SAN).

VirtenSys claiims to be the first company to consolidate and optimise the most commonly deployed networking and storage connectivity in servers. VirtenSys IOV switches create virtualized I/O Clouds where servers' I/O resources are pooled, consolidated, and dynamically allocated on demand based on application needs.

The IOV systems dramatically reduce data center operational expense and complexity, improve I/O utilization to greater than 80 percent, enhance throughput, halve equipment cost and reduce I/O power consumption by more than 60%.

But it's a competitive market.
US Fulcrum for one is talking new data centre 'fabrics' as its new data center network model that is  based on the Clos architecture, originally implemented using proprietary fabrics, was first introduced to Ethernet with Fulcrum's FocalPoint 10GbE switch chips.

This offers Ethernet's lower cost along with standards-compliant scalability without impacting performance. By interconnecting full-bandwidth multi-tier switches in a non-blocking fashion, a dense, fully-connected fabric can be created as used in the Arista and Voltaire systems.

The switch elements are simple and efficient, and connect together in a uniform fashion to create a large scalable fabric. Fulcrum's white paper on Clos architectures provides in-depth analysis of this novel approach. The Clos architecture, says Fulcrum, leads to greater scale, lower cost and lower power while maintaining low end-to-end latency when using FocalPoint switches.

VirtenSys