With the debut of the SFS 1.0 Server Fabric Suite that will become available in November, Xsigo announced its virtual datacenter fabric offering.  The software update complements the company’s existing Xsigo’s I/O Director, XMS Management Software and Fabric Extenders products to form the Xsigo Server Fabric.

The offering basically sets up a networking layer in the computing infrastructure, thus greatly simplifying this part of the datacenter in terms of administration and time spent on usual networking tasks. The virtual fabric also collapses the access and aggregation layers, which reduces in hardware cost cuts.

“As the first technology to virtualize connectivity, the Xsigo Server Fabric allows hardware-independent connections between resources to be dynamically created without having to configure switches, switch ports, or VLANs, thus enabling management tasks to be completed by a single person in minutes, rather than by multiple teams over the course of hours or days.”

A Server Fabric deployment can support up to 64,000 Ethernet and Fibre Channel connections as fast as 40Gbps to a maximum of 1,000 physical servers, according to the company. The technology is not designed for larger scale deployments, but it does simplify the management of smaller ones such as the ones virtual datacenter operator and Xsigo customer Bluelock maintains.

Last month, Emulex also had a virtual fiber product launch. The company announced he two latest adopters to join its Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter or VFA product line, which were developed in partnership with IBM: The Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter II for IBM BladeCenter and the Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter Advanced II for IBM BladeCenter.

One of the companies that play the biggest role in the virtual datacenter fiber space is Juniper Networks with its QFabric offering. QFabric works similarly to Xsigo Server Fabric, and one of the main benefits of the technology is security, according to the networking company, is security. The logic is that the less complex a network is, the easier it is to monitor for security breaches.