3Leaf Lands Intel License For CPU Virtualization

3Leaf Systems today announced it has obtained a license for Intel’s QuickPath
Interconnect, which will allow it to build virtualization support for
Intel servers. Previously, the company only had a HyperTransport
(define) license and only supported AMD servers.

3Leaf uses a direct communication network between server CPUs so data
does not have to go over an Ethernet or Fibre Channel connection. The
company makes special virtualization processors for the motherboard to
virtualize the CPUs, memory and I/O of the entire datacenter.

The 3Leaf technology breaks down the physical walls of x86 servers and
makes their resources available, as needed, across the datacenter. One of the problems in
datacenters is one group of servers dedicated to a task might be running at
five percent utilization, while another group is maxed out and needs more
CPU cycles and more memory.

“We are enabling the next generation of the datacenter, which are going
to be dynamic data centers, where resources, compute, memory or I/O could be
made available to the applications on an on demand basis rather than in a
static way the way it exists today,” said B.V. Jagadeesh, president and CEO
of 3Leaf.

The concept of dynamic data isn’t new with 3Leaf, mainframes have had it for years.
It’s just that x86 servers never could do it because they lacked the power.
“The way the processors used to communicate was too slow to do this,” said
Jagadeesh. “AMD’s HyperTransport interface helped, as does QuickPath.”

The other problem was the back end fabric, as he called networking, had
too much latency to make it acceptable. Now with Infiniband or 10Gbit
Ethernet, such interconnects are possible.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.