Looking to lure a larger customer base, DataCore Software has negotiated a
deal to ship its storage virtualization software with adapters from Promise
Technology.
Promise, a leader of ATA RAID (define) data protection, has agreed to
include a copy of DataCore’s SANmelody Lite software with every storage
adapter card it sells.
The software serves disk capacity to other computers, letting users add
capacity over a network without reconfiguring hardware or rebooting
application servers. Any Windows PC with a Promise adapter card can serve
disk capacity to other computers over Ethernet using the iSCSI
(define) protocol.
Financial terms of the deal were not released but DataCore and Promise have
high hopes for their distribution strategy. The companies said in a
statement they expect to install as many new storage networks in the next
six months as have been installed by all other vendors in the last six
years.
With Promise shipping thousands of adapters a month, the companies believe
the move will be a complete 1-2 punch, requiring no extra hardware and
software to establish and configure a storage area network (define).
DataCore, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., start-up, inked the deal to
compete in the storage virtualization race, where giants like IBM and Hitachi Data Systems (Quote, Chart) hold the line.
According to market research from IDC, Yankee Group and Gartner, customers
are keen on these types of capabilities because they free up enterprise IT
staffs to perform more important tasks. Such on-the-fly allocation also dovetails
with new utility computing strategies.
The interest is stimulating innovation. Behind in the virtualization game,
EMC acquired
VMware last year and is crafting
a Storage Router for an early 2005 release.
HDS recently launched
its TagmaStore platform to perform similar jobs. IBM is aggressively advancing
its virtualization capabilities, bringing them over from the venerable
mainframe machines.
While it’s tough to predict whether DataCore will successfully compete
head-to-head with those giants, the company could be attractive bait for
larger vendors looking to pad their portfolios. The storage market is
regularly contracting: Symantec bid for
back-up software giant Veritas.
In addition to virtualization, DataCore provides a number of other storage
software products, including storage management; storage infrastructure;
volume management; storage provisioning data replication; and storage
resource management (SRM).
Article courtesy of internetnews.com.
