Storage virtualisation solutions now run on virtual machines

Benefits are likely to include more opportunities for consolidation and practical collaboration between the DataCore software and the server virtualisation platforms. However, Datacore believes the real significance is in what this might represent in terms of the continuing evolution of the market away from fixed, single purpose, hardware-based storage, to flexible, hardware-independent, software-based storage solutions and infrastructures. Says Arun Taneja, president of analyst Taneja Group: “What DataCore has done here by putting DataCore virtual storage servers on virtual machines is a subtle way of further emphasising that its hardware-independent software solutions can go places and do things that hardware-based solutions can’t – because of their physicality and built-in limitations on the other devices and systems with which they will work. “This will not be lost on the server virtualisation players, like VMware, Microsoft and Xensource – and is likely to spur opportunities for technical and commercial collaboration with DataCore.” “Certainly the biggest anchor on the virtualisation of enterprise infrastructures has been the physical configurations and complex mapping schemes of storage subsystems and network topologies,” comments Ziya Aral, CTO and chairman of DataCore. And in a moment of poetic genius, he adds: “It is here that the uniqueness of the solution becomes apparent. With DataCore, the storage server is of the same genus as the applications it serves. Both strain to slip their hardware bonds in the desire to achieve true portability. “The release of DataCore’s SANmelody, Traveller and SANsymphony as virtual servers has a symbolic significance for that reason alone. It underscores what has been a reality for over half a dozen years – that storage servers are today identical to all other servers in that they exist primarily as storage applications running on ever more standard hardware.”