News

posted on 07 April 2008 02:26

NetApp's StoreVault products are newly certified with Virtual Iron's server virtualisation software bringing previously unaffordable server and storage virtualisation to small and medium-sized businesses.

StoreVault is NetApp mid-market storage array positioned in storage price/perfprmance below the FAS and V-Series product lines, which are already certified with Virtual Iron (VI). Based on the open source Xen hypervisor Virtual Iron's server virtualisation software has modules such as LiveMigrate, LiveRecovery and LiveCapacity for server migration, recovery and provisioning. There is an automated interface between the VI management console and the StoreVault operating software to speed and simplify storage provisioning and management.

The area of the market the product combination is intended for includes small and medium businesses (SMB) with a ballpark of 5 to 50 servers, perhaps 25 to 500 employees, and one to one and a half IT management resources. Mike Grandinetti, Virtual Iron Software's chief marketing officer, said: "Virtual Iron and StoreVault are unique in that both are very focused on a specific market segment, not the small office/home office market but small enterprises. These are no less demanding than larger enterprises but dearly budget conscious."

Most Virtual Iron customers are iSCSI-based, according to Tim Walsh, the company's marketing director.

There are two areas of competition: server virtualisation; and storage array products. Grandinetti said that the VI server virtualisation product costs $799 per socket, meaning $1,600 for the average dual core server: "For roughly $1,600 you're getting the same VMware capabilites that would cost $6,000 per server. VMware has done a brilliant job of pioneering the market (but) an SMB can't afford it."

On the storage side the competition doesn't include many players, according to Drew Mayer, a product manager in NetApp's StoreVault division: "The Microsoft Windows-based HP and Dell products don't work with NFS and are not certified with iSCSI. Adaptec SnapServers are lacking features and are not VI-certified. Iomega is not really a player (in this market). Regarding Left Hand Networks with its VSA (SW running as a virtual machine) we come at it from a different approach, one of separating servers and storage. It provides better data protection and simpler migration from physical to virtual."

Mayer said a 1TB StoreVault configuration would cost around $3,000.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}