EMC (NYSE: EMC) today unveiled a new offering that the company claims can solve I/O bottlenecks in virtual server environments.
EMC’s PowerPath/VE software offers automated path management, load balancing and fail-over capabilities for VMware’s (NYSE: VMW) new vSphere 4 and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Hyper-V environments.
EMC senior product marketing manager Bob Wambach said the offering builds on the company’s decade-old multipathing technology to “send I/O down the least busy path” instead of “pumping massive amounts of I/Os down a single channel.”
Wambach said PowerPath/VE provides consistent performance when workloads shift or virtual machines are moved, added or removed or channels go offline.
EMC’s announcement was one of many from data storage vendors announcing support for VMware’s new vSphere offering, which VMware bills as the first “cloud operating system.” VMware also added new thin provisioning, virtual disk and data protection features for storage users.
3PAR (NYSE: PAR), CA (NYSE: CA), CommVault (NASDAQ: CVLT), Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), Double-Take Software (NASDAQ: DBTK), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), HP (NYSE: HPQ), IBM (NYSE: IBM), NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA), Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) and Vizioncore were just some of the names signing on to support the new offering.
EMC said PowerPath/VE automates and optimizes server, storage and path utilization, surpassing native multipathing products that require constant monitoring and manual rebalancing. It supports Windows, Linux and UNIX and can be used with any storage system.
EMC said the offering also “dynamically adapts to meet the sustained I/O performance” requirements of its new high-end Symmetrix V-Max array.
PowerPath/VE will be available in June. Pricing starts at $2,100 per physical server for new PowerPath customers and $1,430 for current customers.
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