Mellanox Technologies announced that since its January release of InfiniBand drivers for VMware ESX 3.5, it has seen demand from its partners, and end-users from multiple enterprise data center vertical markets. Driving interest from Fortune 500 companies is the ability to immediately save I/O power (up to 30%) and I/O cost (up to 50%) by consolidating as many as eight slower-speed I/O adapters and associated cabling complexity with a single, high-speed InfiniBand adapter in virtualized environments. With ESX 3.5-based servers using an InfiniBand-based unified I/O, one wire solution, all required I/O services for end-to-end Ethernet LAN and Fibre Channel SAN connectivity can be delivered. Mellanox's InfiniBand products provide the leading consolidated I/O fabric solution for the 3 million virtualized servers estimated to be installed as of 2007, and expected to grow to 15-20 million by 2012.

"InfiniBand adapters and switch products from Mellanox and its OEM partners include built-in reliability services which ensure a lossless and guaranteed service medium for critical storage traffic," said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "Coupled with leading-edge I/O virtualization features and the ability to deliver all data center traffic types over the same I/O pipe, Mellanox InfiniBand solutions are proving to be the most compelling unified I/O solution at many proof-of-concept and production deployments at data centers across the world."

Data center architects and IT managers in vertical sectors such as banking, managed hosting services, Web 2.0, insurance services and healthcare are actively engaged with Mellanox and/or its OEM partners to avail the performance benefits of unified InfiniBand I/O in VMware ESX 3.5-based deployments, and to cut their data center costs.

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