The expansion of Quest in the virtualization space isn’t finished yet: after acquiring Invirtus in June 2007 (which was merged with Vizioncore), Provision Networks in November 2007 (which is now Quest Desktop Virtualization Group) and the remaining part of Vizioncore in January 2008 (which will be Quest Server Virtualization Group sooner or later), the company wants an abstraction layer for the storage and announces today the acquisition of MonoSphere.
MonoSphere is a storage vendor that approached the world of virtualization in early 2008, introducing the idea of dark storage: the storage space wasted by inefficient capacity allocation.
The company states that customers waste on average 30% of storage despite the yearly spending raises of 10% to 15% every year.
The raw storage becomes configured storage, then it’s mapped to a host server (allocated storage), then it’s recognized by the hardware (claimed storage), then it’s presented as volumes (assigned storage), and finally is used by the applications (used storage).
At each step MonoSphere recognizes inefficiency which prevent the optimal allocation of 90-95% of the available space.
MonoSphere joined in February 2008 the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program and supported ESX in its product.
Quest already said that MonoSphere Storage Horizon will continue to exist, but it also said that the product will be integrated with several others in its portfolio.
Easy to guess, one of the first will be vFoglight (formerly esxCharter and then vCharter): the Vizioncore flagship product for performance monitoring and troubleshooting.