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CORAID Announces EtherDrive SAN Host Bus Adapter for VMware ESX 3.5

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CORAID today announced the immediate availability of the EtherDrive Storage Area Network Host Bus Adapter (HBA) that enables VMware ESX 3.5 with AoE technology to deliver affordable, fast EtherDrive SAN solutions to virtualization environments. VMware provides Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program members with tools to develop products that are complementary to VMware virtualization software and help deliver high-value solutions to our joint customers.

CORAID’s EtherDrive SAN Host Bus Adapter for VMware ESX 3.5 helps customers easily embrace VMware virtualization storage with the flexibility and cost savings of AoE-based SAN to ESX hosts. The availability of the new SAN HBA builds on the company’s success in the virtualization market for building innovative, affordable virtualization storage.

With more than 900 members worldwide, the VMware TAP program works with best-of-breed technology partners to provide them a comprehensive set of VMware technical and marketing services, support, tools and expertise to deliver enhanced value to joint customers.

LeftHand Networks Delivers Entry-level SAN for Virtualized Environments

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LeftHand Networks (an HP company) today announced an entry-level storage area network (SAN) solution that improves performance and reduces storage costs within virtualized server environments for midsize businesses.

The LeftHand SAS Starter SAN helps customers efficiently deploy their first virtualization projects by simplifying the process of creating, accessing and managing shared storage resources.
As customers deploy virtual server environments, they frequently encounter unforeseen system performance bottlenecks. To further complicate matters, server virtualization increases the number of required connections to a SAN. This increased system complexity makes it more difficult and costly to troubleshoot when bottlenecks do occur. The LeftHand SAS Starter SAN reduces costs and mitigates these performance issues by automatically balancing data volumes across all disk drives, network connections and processors.
The SAS Starter SAN includes management tools that provide replication, thin provisioning and snapshot capabilities. These capabilities help ensure data availability even as the environment becomes more complex. In addition, customers can purchase only the capacity they need, easily increasing both the capacity and performance of their system without experiencing any disruption. The SAS Starter SAN can scale to more than 80 network ports and 320 disk drives to accommodate business growth.
LeftHand also introduced a higher capacity SATA Starter SAN that offers a 25 percent reduction in the cost per gigabyte (GB) of disk drive capacity than the previous generation. The solution’s storage capacity has increased 33 percent to 12 terabytes (TB) while maintaining its current list price. The SATA Starter SAN is ideal for customers who want to consolidate storage for Microsoft Windows or Linux servers.
The SAS Starter SAN and the higher-capacity SATA Starter SAN are available immediately through LeftHand Networks’ resellers and value-added resellers in the United States as well as value-added distributors throughout Europe.
Pricing starts at $35,000 for the 4.8 TB SAS Starter SAN and $30,000 for the 12 TB SATA Starter SAN.

DataCore Introduces SAN Software Starter Packages For SMBs

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DataCore Software has announced an expanded line of new SAN software starter packages priced for small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs).

The high cost and complexity of traditional SAN storage required to support virtual servers and desktops puts it out of the reach for many small and mid-size businesses. DataCore’s new packages firmly reset the industry’s starting price point for business continuity solutions that provide true auto failover/failback high-availability and fault tolerance. These new packages provide a new level of automated storage protection to ensure business uptime, while also significantly lowering the cost and complexity barriers of SAN storage for Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix, Virtual Iron, Parallels, VMware and other server and desktop virtualization environments.

The new software packages, with entry prices starting at under $2,000 per server, include thin provisioning, data migration technology, storage performance caching software, snapshots for fast disk backups, remote site disaster recovery replication and DataCore’s High Availability (HA) data protection. In virtual server and desktop environments, DataCore’s HA is unmatched in automation (true failover/failback recovery), manufacturer independence (storage and server brands), network connectivity (iSCSI or FC, or both) and proven fault tolerance (deployed in thousands of systems worldwide).

DataCore’s new packages fill the gap between low-end, Windows system replication solutions that provide limited single system data protection (e.g. Double-Take Software) for VMs at a cost of thousands and higher-end, enterprise-class storage arrays and SAN that provide necessary protection but are complex and often cost $100,000 or more. With these packages, DataCore has created a new class of SAN solutions that deliver the highest-end data protection capabilities at a SMB price point.

Cisco Partners With VMware For Its MDS SANs

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As part of its Data Center 3.0 strategy, Cisco is collaborating with VMware to deliver a tested and validated solution for Cisco MDS storage area networks (SANs) designed specifically to help customers improve the security, scalability and management of storage networks attached to VMware environments. The Cisco vision for Data Center 3.0 entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application performance, service levels, efficiency and collaboration.

The combined solution of Cisco MDS SANs with VMware’s Virtual Datacenter OS (VDC-OS) helps customers to more easily implement storage consolidation, disaster recovery, business continuity and storage backup solutions, as well as improve the visibility, security, and traffic isolation of applications.

VMware provides this functionality as part of the VDC-OS, which increases ROI while enabling the flexibility customers need to build next-generation data centers that are highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing. Cisco MDS SANs can now be virtual machine-optimized, delivering a resilient, high-performance fabric to support large, dense virtual environments by providing consistent policy, visibility, and diagnostics for virtual machines across the data center.

Cisco SANs optimized by VMware provide security, mobility, performance monitoring and capacity planning at the virtual machine level, enabling IT managers to better monitor, manage, and scale SAN-attached virtual machines. For example, IT managers can now move, add or change servers without reconfiguring SAN switches or storage arrays, and servers can retain their SAN identity even when moved or replaced in the server chassis.

Cisco and VMware also jointly offer virtualization consulting services to help customers create and deploy server, network and storage virtualization solutions that can reduce cost by provisioning new applications quickly and more safely, while maintaining high levels of application performance.

DataCore Goes After Eastern European Market, Partners With Prosper Intelligence

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DataCore Software and Prosper Intelligence have announced a distribution agreement for Austria and Eastern Europe. Prosper will resell and support SANmelody and SANsymphony™as the SAN and virtual storage component of its virtualization portfolio. Prosper will integrate both SAN software solutions into its showcase “Virtualization Consolidation Academy” (VCA) lab in Vienna.

The Virtualization Consolidation Academy is an innovative knowledge transfer and competence center, which focuses on helping partners and customers evaluate and train and understand virtualization and consolidation technologies. With the agreement, Prosper can provide an end-to-end virtualization portfolio – Total Enterprise Virtualization – to its partner base with the addition of DataCore’s advanced storage virtualization, fault-tolerant SAN and disaster recovery solutions. In addition, DataCore obtains a key distribution partnership with the ability to support and resell into the emerging and growing Eastern European market.

Prosper currently supports a growing base of resellers in Austria and Eastern Europe, who are implementing virtualization and consolidation projects for business-critical applications, servers and data storage. With today’s agreement, DataCore’s storage virtualization technology complements the existing portfolio of desktop, server and application virtualization with a hardware-independent, flexible and cost effective storage solution. The Virtualization Consolidation Academy is seen as an independent review platform that can be used to evaluate, test, train and showcase virtualization solutions and technologies.

DataCore’s virtualization platforms improve the utilization and performance of disk storage, enable a new level of flexibility and hardware independence and reduce the overall cost of storage area networking. With SANmelody, DataCore provides a cost-effective, feature rich SAN solution that includes automated storage management, high availability, disaster recovery and thin provisioning. SANsymphony is the enterprise solution that enables Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and meets the advanced needs of larger organizations in terms of capacity, performance and scalability.

StorMagic Gets SM Series Certified on VMware ESX 3.5 and ESX 3i

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StorMagic, a developer of iSCSI SAN management software, today announced that the StorMagic SM Series has been certified with VMware ESX 3.5 and ESX 3i. The StorMagic SM Series is now listed on the VMware Storage / SAN Compatibility Guide, allowing joint customers to benefit from the latest VMware server virtualization features while being able to easily manage shared storage in their existing virtualized environments.

The StorMagic SM Series software brings enterprise-level iSCSI SAN capabilities to customer environments without the high price tag, allowing organizations with limited IT resources and growing data storage demands to store, share, manage and protect data through a single, easy-to-use interface. Mission-critical storage functions such as data migration, consolidation, and management are now accessible at a lower cost without compromising on performance and without the need for specialized storage skills.

This certification is part of the VMware Storage Certification Program, which is available to VMware Technology Alliance Partners. StorMagic is a Select VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP).