At the end of July a new startup called Pancetera entered the virtualization market with a solution, Unite, to manage and optimize virtual storage in VMware virtual infrastructures.
The storage management component is called SmartView.
SmartView aggregates all the storage resources available inside the virtual infrastructure as a hierarchy, under the P: virtual drive.
The storage optimization component is called SmartRead.
This piece of the solution cuts unnecessary I/O operations by marking which parts of the virtual machine disk file are redundant or no longer in use. SmartRead recreates a normalized VM that is ready to boot while consolidating active data and synthesizing a dedupe optimized VMDK file.
Pancetera recently updated Unite to version 1.2.1, introducing a few new features:
- Folders
The Unite virtual drive now supports the creation of folders - Support for Microsoft Active Directory
Unite can join a domain and domain users can authenticate with the Active Directory when accessing the Pancetera Unite file system - Integration with Nagion and other SNMP monitoring tools
The Unite virtual appliance now includes a plug-in for Nagios