Network Appliance collaborates with VMware
StoreVault, a NetApp division, has announced that its StoreVault S500 has been certified to work with VMware infrastructure.
Combining StoreVault with VMware infrastructure 3 provides small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with infrastructure virtualisation strategies that better manage storage and server resources.
This announcement further expands the joint collaboration between VMware and NetApp to provide combined consolidation solutions for SMB and large enterprise environments.
Available immediately, the StoreVault S500 helps customers realise the benefits of combining storage with infrastructure virtualisation.
VMware Infrastructure enables SMB customers to optimise and manage their IT infrastructure by allowing a single hardware platform to run multiple virtual machine instances simultaneously, maximising hardware efficiency.
When the StoreVault S500 is deployed in VMware environments, it can simplify storage management concerns such as resources, data backup and recovery, and capacity provisioning.
Data growth challenges are creating tremendous headaches in data loss, backup, and recovery for SMBs.
Part of the problem is that many SMB IT environments consist of many servers with direct-attached storage (DAS).
As a result, there is an increasing interest among SMBs to realise the same benefits that enterprise data centres have but on a smaller scale.
Severing the physical dependencies between servers and storage achieves measurably better returns on both server and storage resources.
According to VMware, virtualisation is useful to businesses of all sizes, not just Fortune 500 companies.
SMB IT managers face many of the same pressures as data centre operators when solving storage and server management issues while having fewer resources to address the problems.
Certifying StoreVault with VMware provides a great value proposition to meet the budgetary and reliability needs of smaller firms.
Ahearn, Jasco + Company, an accounting and financial services firm based in south Florida, was living with the pains of older equipment, DAS, and the inability to scale resources every day.
Ahearn, Jasco + Company’s infrastructure consisted of multiple servers running separate applications for more than 35 employees. Many of their servers were legacy systems using DAS that were performance-bound by their disks, which, in many cases, consisted of single drives without RAID. As a result, performance was slow while data redundancy and fault tolerance were major concerns.
According to Altek Computer Group, many SMBs similar to Ahearn, Jasco + Company are realising that DAS is inefficient, painful to grow, and unable to meet growing storage performance demands.
So there was a good opportunity to help Ahearn, Jasco + Company revolutionise their server and storage environment and boost performance by virtualising their resources or, in other words, creating a centralised storage pool that can be accessed by virtual machines.
With tax season quickly approaching, Ahearn, Jasco + Company had to address its need for increased storage.
In the past, this meant adding storage to individual systems in chunks, which led to some servers being underutilised. Ahearn, Jasco + Company decided that adding more DAS was not a viable option due to the low price-performance ratio, high expense, and, most importantly, downtime and disruption to employees during the important tax season.
According to Ahearn, Jasco + Company, it desperately needed to upgrade its entire IT infrastructure on a limited budget.
It became impossible to completely understand the storage sprawl happening in its environment. What Ahearn, Jasco + Company needed was a unified view of all of its resources to improve server and storage allocation.
Backup was another big concern since it relied on tape devices that were painfully slow and did not guarantee disaster recovery something that needed to be fixed with hurricane season coming.
The StoreVault S500 provided Ahearn, Jasco + Company with an enterprise-proven storage technology platform from NetApp that was affordable and easy to use.
The StoreVault S500 allows storage to be added or allocated on-the-fly without disruption to operations. In addition, the StoreVault S500 enables faster backup and recovery for a higher degree of data reliability.
With a single purchase, Ahearn, Jasco + Company gained greater flexibility to grow and respond to future data storage needs without additional investment.
Just as StoreVault simplifies the storage environment, VMware Infrastructure does the same for optimising the use of hardware assets and creating a solution that allows new server, application, and storage capacity to be provided at a moment’s notice.
VMware Infrastructure has been deployed by more than 20,000 enterprise customers on industry-standard servers available from leading server vendors.
SMBs such as Ahearn, Jasco + Company are marrying blade servers running VMware Infrastructure to StoreVault storage systems for greater reliability, flexibility, and affordability.
Multiple VMware virtual machines run on a consolidated hardware platform and access dedicated storage on StoreVault.
The StoreVault S500 meets all storage needs for any new or existing workloads and VMware Infrastructure allows entire virtual machines to be backed up, moved, and replicated with zero downtime.
In addition, Ahearn, Jasco + Company reduced rack space, lowered energy costs, and created a far more flexible environment, while improving data reliability rates and disaster recovery times have also been greatly improved.
Ahearn, Jasco + Company has completely modernised its server and storage environment while meeting our budget requirements.
The combination of StoreVault and VMware Infrastructure provided Ahearn, Jasco + Company a complementary technology solution that solved its business problems.
Ahearn, Jasco + Company now has a network storage infrastructure that will last three to five years with the exciting prospect of future scalability at a cost that is next to nothing.
StoreVault and VMware Infrastructure provided a powerful formula to improve Ahearn, Jasco + Company’s storage and server utilisation and manage igts capacity for future investment.
Nothing like this was available from its traditional storage and server vendors. Also, the StoreVault advanced protection architecture and RAID-DP provided enterprise-class security and data protection functionality at a price that fit its budget.
According to StoreVault a division of Network Appliance, it is seeing an interesting trend among SMBs that are looking for smarter, more reliable alternatives to the traditional way of handling storage and iSCSI SAN and infrastructure virtualisation are getting a lot of attention.
Its strategic relationship with VMware is designed to bring added value to IT generalists within SMBs that are tasked with taming storage and infrastructure management with a limited budget.
Ahearn, Jasco + Company is a great example of one way VMware Infrastructure can be brought into play for SMBs with StoreVault storage platform.
24-Apr-2007