I/O consolidation and virtualization solutions vendor NextIO launched a rack-level appliance on Wednesday it says will simplify deployment and management of server I/O.

Based on the industry-standard PCI-Express (PCIe) protocol, the vNET I/O Maestro uses the company's IOV architecture, which enables a single I/O device to appear as multiple virtual adapters. This way, servers in the rack can share one PCIe device.

KC Murphy, NextIO CEO, said the company's consolidation products for data centers aimed to maximize efficiency of complex I/O.

"With vNET I/O Maestro's ability to remove layers of data center infrastructure complexity, we have expanded upon our vision to bring new levels of efficiency to data center professionals everywhere," Murphy said.

NextIO senior VP of worldwide sales and marketing Mike Heumann said this was the company's first product to focus on network consolidation. Its previous ones were focused on I/O expansion for IBM BladeCenter and other server products, as well as on GPU and flash-memory consolidation.

vNET I/O Maestro consolidates Fibre Channel and Ethernet. The solution supports between 15 and 30 x86 servers running Windows, Linux and VMware. It includes eight hot-swappable I/O modules that can be shared across servers and four hot-swappable modules that can be dedicated to specific modules.

It supports dual-port 10Gb Ethernet NICs and dual-port 8Gb Fibre Channel HBAs in shared slots.

Heumann said because the solution rids the customers of the need to manage the number of switch ports and cabling required without a consolidation appliance, its deployment can typically result in 20-30% CapEx savings and 40-60% OpEx savings.

The cost of a 30-server implementation of vNET I/O Maestro is between US$90,000 and $100,000, he said.