Vendors Roll Out Products At VMworld

virtualization VMworld conference in Los Angeles

EqualLogic, Nashua, N.H., was demonstrating the latest member of its PS family of iSCSI tiered storage arrays, which allow both on-line and archive data to reside within a single enclosure.

Steve Peabody, vice president of sales at EqualLogic, said his company is currently offering a spif of $5,000 for every account into which a solution provider sells a minimum of $20,000 worth of VMware product and/or services along with any EqualLogic array.

The spif, which is in effect through Dec. 31, can be used to buy more VMware products or services, buy EqualLogic products or increase margins. The incentive is available for both new and existing accounts, Peabody said.

The spif is in addition to EqualLogic's normal solution provider margins, including 32 points of margin protection the company offers to deals which are registered before they are closed, he said.

FalconStor Software, Melville, N.Y., used VMworld to unveil Storage Replicator for VMware, a new application aimed at replicating data in a VMware environment.

Storage Replicator for VMware replicates data with transactional integrity, said John Lallier, co-founder and vice president of technology at FalconStor.

Lallier said that previous FalconStor software for VMware replicated data using snapshot technology. However, that image of the data was made without regard to the state of any uncompleted transactions. "You could recover from a snapshot, but if a transaction wasn't closed, the system might crash," he said.

The new version ties snapshots to the transactional state of an application, which allows customers to bring up a VMware snapshot at a remote site, Lallier said.

Storage Replicator for VMware is expected to ship at the end of December, said Wendy Petty, vice president of North America sales for the company.

A software-only version of the application lists for about $14,000, while an appliance version with the software already pre-configured on a server lists for about $20,000, she said. It is targeted at medium to large-sized customers with SANs who have already updated their VMware environment to Virtual Infrastructure 3.0, Petty said.

In December or January, FalconStor plans to unveil SIR, or Single Instance Repository, which is de-duplication technology for use with virtual tape libraries, Petty said.

Data de-duplication, also called "data de-dupe," removes duplicate information as data is backed up or archived. It can be done on the file level, where duplicate files are replaced with a marker pointing to one copy of the file, or at the sub-file level, or byte level, where duplicate bytes of data are removed, resulting in a decrease in storage capacity requirements of several magnitudes.

Officials of Xiotech, Eden Prairie, Minn., said at VMworld that the company's Magnitude 3D 3000 storage system, which allows simultaneous connection to Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs, was certified compatible to VMware ESX Server 3.0.

Emulex, Costa Mesa, Calif., said at VMworld that its LightPulse Virtual Host Bus Adaptor technology for 4-Gbits-per-second Fibre Channel SANs is expected to be ready for use with the VMware Infrastructure during the first half of 2007.