EMC Touts Improvements Of Storage Efficiency In VMware Environments

EMC has announced three new storage integrations with the new VMware vSphere 4.1 enabling customers of all sizes to dramatically improve the efficiency of their VMware environments.

Now delivering more than 55 integration points with VMware solutions, the combined solutions are easy-to-use with the best overall performance. EMC has by far the most integrated solution support for VMware environments and continues to underscore its position as the number one choice in storage for VMware environments with customers choosing EMC two times as often as any other vendor.

Released today, VMware vSphere 4.1 includes new VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI).  Through VAAI, VMware vSphere can now offload specific storage operations to EMC’s industry leading enterprise and mid-range arrays increasing both overall system performance and efficiency.

EMC supports all three of VMware’s new vStorage API’s including:

• Full Copy. EMC delivers hardware accelerated copying of data by performing all operations on the array. Customers can achieve up to 10 times faster virtual machine creation and data movement via VMware Storage vMotion.
• Block Zero. EMC delivers hardware accelerated initialization reducing Input/Output by up to a factor of 10 for common tasks such as creating new virtual machines.  This feature is especially beneficial when creating fault-tolerant (FT) enabled or thinly provisioned virtual machines.
• Hardware Assisted Locking. EMC delivers improved locking controls on VMFS storing up to 10 times as many virtual machines per datastore and booting virtual machines up to four times faster.  This improves performance of common tasks such as virtual machine migration, powering many virtual machines on or off and creating a virtual machine from a template.

VAAI is the newest set of APIs added to the VMware vStorage API family and EMC is one of the only multiprotocol storage vendors to support all four sets of VMware vStorage APIs which in addition to VAAI include:

• VMware vStorage API for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager offers customers the ability to reduce the recovery time objectives of a site disaster from weeks or day to minute by automating the recovery process.  EMC has adapters for all replication products including EMC Symmetrix Remote Disaster Facility (SRDF), EMC RecoverPoint, EMC MirrorView, and EMC Celerra Replicator and furthers these integrations by offering the ability to automatically failback to the primary site once the outage has been mitigated.
• VMware vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) leverages the snapshot capabilities of VMware vSphere to enable virtual machine image backup without requiring downtime.  Fully supported on EMC Avamar, administrators have the ability to efficiently deduplicate backup data within and across virtual machines, significantly reducing backup time and backup storage.  In addition, they can recover a single file from an image backup to a virtual machine without installing any software agents.  Taking advantage of the Changed Block Tracking feature of VADP, combined with the Avamar architecture for deduplication, further reduces backup windows, and dramatically shortens recovery time.
• VMware vStorage API for Multipathing provides mulitpathing integration with EMC PowerPath VE adding higher path availability, providing dynamic load balancing, and greatly increasing performance on VMware vSphere.