Storage Networks Meet Virtual Ones

Virtual environments share all the data protection requirements of their original physical counterparts, including SAN connectivity, and a growing number of suppliers aim to help.

This week alone, several vendors announced various levels of data protection for virtual networks, including the following:

• Emulex
  The vendor announced today that it's worked with Cisco and VMware to integrate its 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel HBAs, Cisco's Fibre Channel switches, and VMware's ESX Server 3.5. The offering deploys Emulex's technique of adding firmware to its HBAs that enables them to interact with virtual machines. Emulex is also leveraging N Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), which essentially fences off one virtual machine's storage from another.

  "Implementing Emulex's LightPulse Virtual HBA technology with industry-standard NPIV support is a necessary step in our ongoing transition to a virtualized data center environment," said Levi Spears, SAN and Windows system administrator for online shopping firm Home Interiors & Gifts, in a prepared statement. "With the full integration of Emulex Virtual HBA technology within VMware ESX Server, we now have an easy route to implement SAN management best practices with capabilities such as zoning, array LUN masking and mapping across all of our virtual machines."

  Emulex claims the solution is available now to interested customers.

• DataCore
  This vendor has certified its SANmelody and SANsymphony products for Citrix XenServer environments. Storage virtualization goes hand-in-hand with server, desktop and application delivery virtualization,” said George Teixeira, DataCore's CEO, in a prepared statement.

  DataCore's products, which divvy up standard AMD/Intel or virtual servers into pools of disk storage, now can communicate directly with the applications running in Citrix networks based on virtualization from XenSource, the company Citrix purchased for its virtualization technology. XenSource was bought by Citrix for $500 million in October 2007.

• Neverfail Group
  This company, which offers replication software for Exchange and other Windows-based apps, unveiled a version of its software that runs with VMware's VirtualCenter -- the product that contains administrative elements for managing a VMware Infrastructure.