Look, Ma, No Hardware

Adoption of storage virtualization still trails server virtualization. But storage virtualization is real and will catch on, for the same reasons that drove server virtualization: Flexibility, and lower costs for both storage products and ongoing management. 

That's where DataCore Software Corp. comes in. It has a strong, ten-year history built around a unique story of selling storage virtualization delivered through software that isn’t tied to any vendor’s hardware (supporting multiple flavors of server hardware as well as disk technology.) It offers a broad product suite ranging from SANsymphony on the high end to SANmelody on the low end. Its newest offering is SANharmony, which it claims allows network-attached (NAS) storage accessed via Windows servers to be managed by the same tools, and given the same capabilities, as the SAN storage already managed by existing DataCore software.

I like DataCore’s story of hardware independence, since customers like choice, independence and flexibility. They also look well-positioned for the upcoming convergence of server and storage provisioning. Finally, they’ve coined an eye-catching marketing term: "Virtualization 2.0,” meaning the ability to easily perform functions such as snapshots, thin provisioning and continuous data protection on “pooled” storage. That’s the kind of word-smithing more virtualization vendors could benefit from.

Comments

[Piyush]

In a virtual storage environment, vendor-neutral products are a great tool to prevent being tied down to a particular vendor; especially because these days companies often purchase an entire data solution that covers everything from storage to security.

And yes, the company does seem to have a way with words... nice musical names.