NextIO announced the ExpressConnect family of products. ExpressConnect is a family of ioGateway products for the virtualization market. The ExpressConnect are end-to-end connectivity solutions that leverage industry standard PCI Express (PCIe) technology.

The ioGateway segment of the virtualization market is defined as products enabling seamless IO Virtualization (IOV) to all standard industry endpoints (or devices) using industry-standard drivers residing in either rack or blade form factors. The segment encompasses both expansion and sharing opportunities.

The N1400-PCM High-Speed Switch Module enables blade servers to expand their PCIe signals outside of the chassis. It delivers a combined 35Gbps of I/O throughput external to the chassis for connectivity to standard PCI Express devices. The N2800-ICA enables flexible configuration of standard PCI Express devices for I/O expansion, partitioning, and virtualization. It offers up to 14 full-length, full-power PCI Express devices to be connected to and partitioned among multiple blade or rack servers.

“These ExpressConnect products directly address the manageability and flexibility demands of any number of solutions in dense computing applications,” said David Hill, Principal of the Mesabi Group. “These include applications such as high-bandwidth HD video processing, vector processing and financial modeling, Web2.0 datacenter virtualization, and many others. NextIO provides seamless connectivity to any industry standard endpoint or device using standard drivers. This any-to-any connectivity, in effect, heralds the obsolescence of fixed I/O infrastructures.”

NextIO’s ExpressConnect products provide an optimal platform using PCI Express and since no new software or protocols are required, they complement any high-bandwidth solution that requires flexibility, manageability, and scalability. For example, NextIO demonstrated end-to-end HD video streaming using the IBM BladeCenter H. Customers could pair the advantages of full-density blade solutions with standard PCIe I/O cards in order to produce streaming live, uncompressed HD video.

“We are gratified by the huge customer demand we have received for our new ExpressConnect products. These are the first in a series of breakthrough solutions to be shipped into the multi-billion dollar ioGateway virtualization marketplace,” noted K.C. Murphy, CEO and co-founder of NextIO. “For the first time, these products will enable data centers and other dense computing environments to receive immediate benefit from the expansion, manageability and flexibility opportunities that have not previously been available.”