15 Storage Standouts Spotted At VMware PEX 2015

Storage Take Center Stage At VMware Partner Exchange 2015

The key to efficiently running and managing a virtualized or cloud environment is the ability to easily access and manage the storage on which such environments run. That becomes evident when walking the halls at the recently concluded VMware Partner Exchange conference, where VMware and its storage vendor partners showed new ways to increase the integration of virtualization and the cloud with storage.

While VMware led the way with the introduction of Virtual SAN (VSAN) 6.0 and Virtual Volumes (VVOLs), its partners showed how they could take advantage of those technologies with their own offerings.

Turn the page, and walk the VMware PEX show floor with CRN.

DataGravity Integrates With VMware vRealize

DataGravity, Nashua, N.H., unveiled new plugins for its DataGravity Discovery Series of data-aware storage systems for the VMware vRealize hybrid cloud management suite, letting vRealize users take advantage of operational, security and business insights from the DataGravity storage solutions. The integration will help make it easier to consolidate and analyze system logs, alerts and data to identify security and compliance issues.

New is the DataGravity Management Pack for VMware vRealize Operations, which provides data intelligence and operational visibility across all elements of the virtualized infrastructure; and the DataGravity Content Pack for VMware vRealize Log Insight for aggregated log analysis and enhanced troubleshooting.

Dell Supports VSAN 6.0, VVOLs

Dell said it will support VMware Virtual SAN and Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) as soon as they become available. Dell will support VSAN 6.0 with its latest 13th-generation PowerEdge servers to give customers a single, virtualized layer of compute and storage to address a broad range of use cases and workloads. Dell also expects to support the new VVOLs at launch, initially with its Dell Storage PS series of storage solutions to give customers virtual-machine-aware storage that can be managed from the virtual machine and not at the LUN or volume level.

Hewlett-Packard Integrating VSAN 6.0, VVOLs On 3PAR Storage

HP is delivering Day 1 support and certification for vSphere 6 and vSphere Virtual Volumes across midrange, high-end and all-flash HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage arrays, enabling customers to upgrade vSphere on the proven HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage platform as soon as they are ready. HP will also provide support for vSphere 6 across the HP StoreVirtual, MSA and XP Storage platforms. While much of the storage industry is not yet ready to support this advanced virtualization capability, HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage was selected by VMware as the only Fibre Channel reference platform for its Virtual Volumes development at the start of the program. This engineering-level approach with VMware means that HP has all the expertise necessary to help customers quickly and easily tap the benefits of new vSphere 6 features with their HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage infrastructure.

Hitachi Data Systems Supports VVOLs

HDS said at VMware PEX that it will support VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes across a variety of its offerings, including its Hitachi NAS Platform and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform family of storage systems.

The company said that combining VVOLs with Hitachi storage virtualization and converged management software forms a software-defined storage management framework and helps in the development of software-defined data centers. Also, by introducing a policy-based management system, provisioning of virtual machines and applications becomes more streamlined and easier to change over time.

Infinio Systems Intros New Channel Program

Cambridge, Mass.-based Infinio Systems unveiled its new multitiered Infinio channel partner program at VMware PEX 2015 to help solution providers, distributors and consultants be better prepared to bring Infinio's content-based storage acceleration technology to storage and IT administrators to help optimize the performance of their virtualized data centers.

The program is targeted at solution providers selling virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), storage, VMware and related solutions. The Infinio Accelerator solution separates the delivery of IOPs and capacity with a dedicated performance layer to help scale storage performance via a server-side, software-based approach to support virtualized enterprise applications and desktops.

Kemp Integrates With VMware vRealize

The new Kemp LoadMaster management pack for VMware vRealize Operations from New York-based Kemp Technologies provides improved visibility into the performance of customers' distributed KEMP-powered application delivery infrastructures. The solution's prepackaged dashboards display near realtime LoadMaster and virtual machine metrics that provide administrators with enhanced access into health and performance information in one consolidated place. This allows seemingly unrelated events to be correlated into larger developing problems to more quickly and proactively deal with them as a way to improve efficiency and cost savings in terms of problem-resolution cycles.

NetApp Demos New EVO: Rail Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance

At VMware PEX '15, NetApp demonstrated the NetApp Integrated EVO: Rail solution, a new hyper-converged infrastructure solution powered by VMware EVO: Rail and the NetApp Data ONTAP operating system. The solution, unveiled in December and scheduled to ship in the first half of 2015, is a preintegrated solution including hardware, software and support. It includes flash-accelerated, scale-out NetApp enterprise storage to simplify IT transformation, along with unified management to help reduce complexity, speed time to provision virtual machines and storage, and provides comprehensive local and remote data protection.

Nexenta Combines Software-defined Storage With VMware VSAN

Nexenta, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based developer of software-defined storage, said at VMware PEX that its NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN has been upgraded to offer day-one support for VMware Virtual SAN 6.0.

Sitting on top of the VMware Virtual SAN, NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN integrates with and augments VMware Virtual SAN by adding enterprise-class Windows and UNIX-based file services without the need for any additional hardware purchases.

NexentaConnect with VSAN 6.0 helps customers take advantage of capabilities as all-flash architectures, VSAN data snapshots and clones, rack awareness for improved reliability, and increased scalability and performance.

NexGen Integrates Flash Storage With VVOLs

NexGen Storage, Louisville, Colo., used VMware PEX 2015 to show a tight integration with VVOLs in its NexGen hybrid flash array.

Benefits of this integration, according to NexGen, includes a consolidation of storage silos and policy-based quality of service across multiple storage tiers, the ability to manage quality of service down to individual virtual machines, the ability to dynamically change performance based on changing quality of service requirements with no need for migrating the data, and to manage hybrid flash array services on a per-virtual machine basis.

OneCloud Software

Boston-based hybrid cloud management technology developer OneCloud Software launched its One-Cloud partner program at VMware PEX 2015. The One-Cloud partner program provides MSPs and other solution providers with resources specifically aimed helping grow their business with OneCloud Recovery, an automated solution for disaster recovery and business continuity which leverages Amazon Web Services as the disaster recovery site.

MSPs can use One Cloud Software to offer cost-effective disaster recovery and business continuity to customers without the complexity or capital investment required for a dedicated recovery site. For other solution providers, OneCloud Recovery includes and assessment tool to help build a solution specific to a customer's requirements.

Pure Storage: Storage Replication For VMware vCenter SRM

Pure Storage unveiled availability of its new Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and an enhanced VMware vSphere Web Client Plug-in. These solutions, when paired with Pure Storage FlashArray 400 Series arrays, provide a simple, seamless solution with comprehensive disaster recovery protection and scalable availability for VMware environments.

With the expanded SRA plug-in, VMware administrators can manage storage provisioning within the vSphere management interface while delivering agile storage services optimized for improving virtual machine availability and performance. It also integrates interactively with Pure's replication, snapshot and protection policies to offer global protection of virtual machines and vSphere clusters.

SanDisk Unveils All-Flash VSAN 6.0 Solution Support

At VMware PEX 2015, Milpitas, Calif.-based flash storage vendor SanDisk unveiled support for an all-flash VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 solution for business-critical applications and databases. The new solution, which scales from a 4-node cluster to up to 64 nodes, leverages SanDisk's Lightning Gen. II 12-Gb/s SAS SSDs and CloudSpeed SATA SSDs to provide cache and persistent storage.

SanDisk said its solution provides high performance for enterprise applications, such as database transaction processing, virtual desktop infrastructure and line-of-business applications.

Tintri Unveils vRealize Integration

Tintri, the Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of hybrid flash and disk storage appliances for virtualized environments, said at VMware PEX 2015 that it is now shipping its vRealize Operations (vROps) Management Pack. That management pack allows VMware vRealize users to easily view details from within a Tintri VMstore.

Tintri called vROps an operations management platform for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures, including multiple hypervisors, and said a single VMstore appliance can support multiple workloads and hypervisors. Together, they help vROps platform managers focus more on business issues and less on troubleshooting storage issues affecting applications.

Vembu Technologies: Guaranteed RTO, RPO On Live Vmware Replication

Vembu Technologies, an Addison, Texas-based provider of technology to let solution providers build their own branded cloud storage offerings, unveiled BDR v3.0. Vembu said BDR v3.0 is the first backup and disaster recovery offering to provide live VMware replication functionality with guaranteed RTO (return to operations) and RPO (recovery point objectives) of less than 15 minutes.

BDR v3.0 also features improved deduplication, WAN acceleration and restore verification, and includes a universal granular recovery tool for Exchange, SQL and SharePoint servers.

Vembu also unveiled a Virtual Backup Appliance specifically designed for VMware vSphere, vCenter and vCloud Director environments.

VMware Introduces VSAN 6, Takes Wrapper Off VVOLs

VMware introduced the latest version of its VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) software-defined storage technology and the long-awaited release of its VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) technology for adding native virtual machine awareness to third-party storage systems.

New with VMware VSAN 6 is an all-flash storage architecture that allows customers to use flash storage including SSDs separately as cache and as primary persistent storage. Scalability was doubled to a maximum of 64 nodes, with each host able to run up to 200 virtual machines.

VVOLs lets customers expand their policy control plane to VVOL-enabled storage systems to automatically enable VMware virtual machine-aware storage.