EMC has unveiled new software for Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) system which it claims to cut VMware environment storage space in half, doubles cloning speed and automates failback.
The company said that the new Celerra Plug-Ins for VMware environments, aimed at midrange storage systems, reduce virtual machine storage capacity requirements by up to 50% through thin provisioning, deduplication and improved management.
The Plug-Ins will also boost the cloning of virtual machine data 2-to-3 times faster than existing offerings will fully automate the failback process for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager software in NFS environments, the company claims.
Hatem Naguib, vice president of alliances at VMware, said: These new capabilities from EMC greatly increase the ease-of-use and resource optimization for mutual customers, integrating with VMware vSphere through common deployment interfaces. Now VMware administrators have enhanced control to reduce storage consumption, maintain service levels for performance-sensitive applications, and simplify storage management and data recovery tasks.
According to EMC, the new software enables VMware admins to perform snapshot or clone operations of individual virtual machines from the VMware vCenter Server console, which are hardware-accelerated within the Celerra unified storage system.
In addition, the Celerra data deduplication software enables compression of VMware virtual machine disk files, which reduces the storage capacity required for virtual machines in addition to usage of capacity through thin provisioning.
Mark Sorenson, senior vice president of unified storage division at EMC, said: As virtual environments – and the inherent management complexities for managing these environments – grow, EMC continues to bring to market storage solutions and features such as compressing virtual machines, cloning virtual machines, and automating failback/failover to solve our customers’ challenges.
