Just two days ago Dell took the stage announcing a number of new product and services focused on virtualization.
Easy to imagine, the most interesting piece of their news release was about a new feature called Auto-Snapshot for VMware Infrastructure, a VirtualCenter plug-in available at the end of the month for free to any EqualLogic SAN customers.
Of curse EMC, fully committed to invest on its own subsidiary VMware, had to answer in an appropriate way: the company announced a new version of its Replication Manager for VMware Infrastructure.
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With the latest version of Replication Manager, management of copies and complete recovery of both physical and virtual environments is handled through a single console. Now, the EMC data protection software provides integrated array replicas at the VMware virtual machine level and integrates with VMware ESX Servers and Virtual Center APIs to ensure virtual machine consistency. This streamlines virtual machine file system (VMFS) replica management by providing near-instant, virtual machine consistent backup and recovery of VMFS delivered via EMC’s array based snapshot and clone technology.
This new functionality can be used for direct integration with VMware VMFS providing instant VMFS level backup and virtual machine level restore. Automating and scheduling VMFS replicas has become much easier through intuitive easy-to-use wizards and a point-and-click user interface. Customers can leverage replicas created by Replication Manager for a single virtual machine level restore through VMware’s VirtualCenter management software…
The new version of the product, Replication Manager 5.1 Service Pack 2, is available now.
Looking at the latest announcements It’s clear enough that virtualization is not only boosting the storage sales. It’s also exacerbating the competition as the storage layer will become one of the key differentiation in a world where the hypervisor is a commodity and the customers look for VDI and data center automation.