EMC, VMware Link Up on Software-Designed Storage Offerings

on rapid advancement of software-defined storage architectures and emerging models for the way applications consume storage in virtualized environments.Initial offerings emerging from this software-defined storage collaboration will focus on the SMB markets, in which it has been customary to use vSphere singularly across a broad set of workloads, making the tight integration of VMware Virtual SAN with VMware vCenter Server. The efforts will focus on joint research and development projects, the creation of joint EMC and VMware proven solutions, and joint test and validation labs.

Offerings emerging from the collaboration are targeted to span a multitude of customer use cases for implementing software-defined storage in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), test/dev and disaster recovery environments. Each targeted use case will be optimized for deployment on VMware Virtual SAN infrastructure, supported by storage policy-based management and featuring significantly reduced TCO through the use of low-cost server-side storage.

To ensure tight integration and execution, EMC and VMware have initiated and are building out geographically distributed development labs focused on product definition, compatibility testing, and the optimization of EMC, VMware and third-party technologies.

“EMC's collaboration with VMware around VMware Virtual SAN promises a compelling software-defined storage value proposition for smaller organizations with fewer resources,” said Dave Vellante, CEO and Co-founder of analyst firm Wikibon. “Critical high availability and migration services, with granular, policy-based control at the virtual machine level, will be possible without the complexity and expense of large storage networks. Importantly, validated, tested and proven solutions emerging from this software-led initiative will enable IT pros to focus resources on tasks other than troubleshooting storage.”