IBM, DataCore Bring Virtualization To Customers and Partners With SANSymphony

IBM is moving forward with its virtualization strategy by teaming up with some smaller players that already have a product out on the market.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based company this week announced a partnership deal with DataCore Software to resell its flagship SANSymphony application that can pool back-end disk capacity within a storage area network (SAN) and serve it up to front-end servers.

"Starting Nov. 26, any IBM customer or IBM partner will now accept through IBM SKU cards orders for SANSymphony," says Ken Horner, vice president of marketing at DataCore, headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

DataCore executives say this makes IBM the largest partner to resell its flagship product. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and Fujitsu Ltd also resell SANsymphony. But recently, HP acquired a virtualization product through its $300-million merger with StorageApps.

"I think they would say that DataCore is not an integral part of the HP virtualization strategy," says Horner.

The SANSymphony application resides on a dedicated Windows NT server and uses virtualization technology to logically pool data from back-end storage devices, such as EMC's Symmetrix, so it can be centrally pooled and allocated to front-end servers.

IT managers can do this from a central console and accomplish the task with simple drag-and-drop move. Virtualization holds the promise of solving a common problem in heterogeneous environments: the inability to move disk volumes between different vendors' hardware and platforms.

"SANSymphony allows IT managers to present the back-end storage to the front-end application servers. We do it on a SAN, anything from an enterprise disk array to a JBOD," says Horner.

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