SINGAPORE: EMC has announced  its  storage virtualization solution for fiber-channel based storage area networks (SANs) to be available in Q3. The solution, which is presently meant for large organizations, provides storage volume management, which can be used to create logical storage volumes for the servers from physical storage volumes. The ability to create logical volumes provides advantages such as dynamic volume migration and better volume management.

The solution works as a combination of an EMC appliance (it is not a storage box) and special SAN switches, which provide port-level access to the virtualization operations of the appliance. These switches, available from Brocade, Cisco, and later, McData, are different from traditional SAN switches provided by these vendors, but integrate seamlessly with the existing switches.

The appliance connects directly to the switches and performs all virtualization operations. EMC differentiates its virtualization offering, from other vendors, by providing virtualization engine on the storage network, rather that on the storage device, or in the storage data path.

With the virtualization engine being on the network, it enables faster volume migration, as the data does not have to travel to the servers for migration. This way data can be migrated without disturbing the applications or the primary volume whose data is being migrated.

The solution works with storage devices provided by various vendors and not necessarily EMC and follows the FAIS (Fabric Application Interface Standard and SNIAs (Storage Networking Industry Association) SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative) specification for storage management.

The EMC virtualization product, Invista, costs $225,000 for managing 64TB of data.

CyberMedia News

The author was hosted by EMC at Singapore for the media announcement.

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