Bay Microsystems announced that SOFTBANK TELECOM has deployed Bay Microsystems ABEx2020 Multi-Service Transport Gateway to deliver high- performance carrier Infiniband services as part of its Wide Area Virtualization infrastructure and to demonstrate its automated multi-site disaster recovery solution.

The Wide Area Virtualization infrastructure, implemented between SOFTBANK TELECOM data centers in Tokyo and Osaka (approximately 500 km apart), included virtualization of servers, storage, and I/O. Infiniband was adopted as the datacenter network, providing the highest performing unified server and storage solution. SOFTBANK TELECOM successfully demonstrated the automated recovery of VMware virtual servers at the remote data center and the ability to migrate VMware servers between data centers live without interruption.

The Bay Microsystems ABEx 2020 Multi-Service Transport Gateway enabled SOFTBANK TELECOM to extend the Infiniband network between data centers across their wide area OC-192 SONET network. Ethernet services were also provisioned from the same ABEx 2020 in order to interconnect the network management network at both sites. The ABEx 2020 delivers multiple services, including carrier Infiniband, at line rate speeds across any metro or wide area network. This enabled SOFTBANK TELECOM to extend high performance server virtualization, storage virtualization, and I/O virtualization between multiple datacenters.

"Using Bay Microsystems Infiniband extension, we were able to realize a scalable solution that enables rapid, automated, and remotely managed disaster recovery between disparate data centers," said Takeshi Hashimoto, senior research engineer at SOFTBANK TELECOM Laboratories. "This allows us to deliver services that greatly improve our customer's continuity of operations, capabilities that have been difficult to achieve with existing solutions."

As a result of the trial deployment, the following industry firsts were demonstrated:

• Automated recovery of virtual machines at remote data centers
• Migration of live application servers between data centers

"We are delighted to work together with SOFTBANK TELECOM to develop and deliver this innovative solution which will undoubtedly raise the bar for performance and reliability between geographically-separated data centers spanning metro or wide area networks," said Peter Yamasaki, Systems Business Development Director at Bay Microsystems. "Wide Area Virtualization allows enterprises and providers to realize important new capabilities by extending virtual machine infrastructure globally."

Additional contributions to the solution included I/O virtualization from Xsigo Systems, storage virtualization and mirroring from DataCore Software Corporation and integration assistance from Sumisho Computer Systems Corporation (SCS).