EMC's Virtualization Product To Go On Major Switches

EMC's new Invista network storage virtualization solution, introduced Monday, will take advantage of intelligent storage area network (SAN) switch platforms from leading switch vendors Brocade Communications Systems, Cisco Systems, and McData Corp. to give the storage architecture a running start.

EMC Invista "gives customers the flexibility to implement storage virtualization as a transparent process that is additive and complementary to their existing infrastructures, while addressing very specific business needs like non-disruptive operation," said Mark Lewis, EMC's executive vice president and chief development officer, in a statement.

Garrett Van Siclen, EMC OEM marketing director at Brocade, noted that Invista can be integrated in existing IT applications or added to new deployments. "The advantage of the (Invista) application running on the Brocade platform is that it integrates seamlessly with the largest installed base of fibre channel SANs in the world," Van Siclen said via e-mail. "Because it leverages port-level processing and is built on a highly scalable 'out-of-band' architecture, Invista is the only storage virtualization solution capable of delivering these capabilities on a scale and with the levels of performance and reliability required for deployment in enterprise data centers."

Also hailing the concept whereby EMC's Invista solution will piggyback on its existing SAN switches was Soni Jiandani, vice president and general manager of High End Switching and Storage Business Units at Cisco. He noted that the EMC-Cisco partnership in Invista provides advanced features supporting standard Virtual SANs and integrated multiprotocol capability for iSCCI and FCIP. In a statement, Jiandani said: "The work by both our companies in developing the emerging Fabric Application Interface Standard (FAIS) will bring customers greater choice and flexibility."

Wayne Morris, McDATA's senior vice president of Worldwide sales, said that the Invista solutions will operate with his firm's VSM platform. He said Invista virtualization applications will enable multiple devices and fabrics to perform well in situations requiring high bandwidth and high performance.

The Invista solution addresses many security, total cost of ownership, and information lifecycle applications that are increasingly important to IT managers. "Customers have very challenging requirements from security to TCO and more," said Van Siclen. "The features of Invista enable customers to meet their infrastructure requirements. Invista is especially beneficial to information lifecycle management applications to lower total cost of ownership."

In its announcement at its EMC Technology Summit in New Orleans, EMC said Invista works through "the simple and non-disruptive movement, copying and migration of data" across heterogeneous storage arrays.

EMC said normally disruptive processes like lease rollovers, technology refreshes, and moving data across different information environments is enabled by Invista. The firm expects its beta testing of Invista to be completed later in the current quarter for Brocade and Cisco switches while support for McDATA products is expected early next year. An Invista configuration virtualizing at least 64 storage terabytes is priced at $225,000, EMC said.