Symantec Corp. plans to announce, on Tuesday, a new solution intended to help organizations improve storage I/O performance and availability for VMware vSphere implementations. The product, Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware, is designed to help companies increase I/O performance, increase visibility and improve management of underlying storage, as well as enhance the availability of the virtual machine and applications.
"Organizations are moving mission-critical applications to VMware, but when they do that, they add certain SLAs or performance requirements that they have to meet," Dan Lamorena, director of product marketing for Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "That is where the rubber meets the road and people really want to make sure that they get that performance, and this is why the solution is so needed."
Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware is a new product for VMware platforms, but Symantec has had the product for other operating systems, notes Lamorena.
VMware has its own multi-pathing solution, but this is understood to be a difficult situation for a lot of companies, explains Lamorena. "That is why we partnered very closely with them to deliver with this solution. It fits inside the VMware hypervisor and it is really a nice extension for them to add performance that they can provide to the customers. This helps them to get more of those critical applications to their environment."
Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware helps companies manage virtualized I/O paths through multiple algorithms and intelligent load balancing from inside the VMware environment, and integrates seamlessly with VMware vCenter or by a command-line interface to provide administrative and monitoring capabilities within the VMware environment. In the event of a path failure, Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware automatically routes data to an available path and then restores the failed paths as they become available - providing efficient storage management and availability across disparate storage hardware.
The product provides storage optimization capabilities to block-based SAN storage environments including automated priority based I/O scheduling. As the amount of virtualized storage increases - often consuming the same I/O path, conflicts may arise resulting in failed paths, says Symantec. Restoration of these paths can be complicated due to a lack of visibility into either the virtual environment or the physical SAN. The load-balancing and management capabilities of Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware help improve I/O connectivity performance and reliability, thus providing increased availability.
Symantec is also announcing an agreement with NetApp, under which the company will resell Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware, Lamorena adds.
Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware is available immediately through the channel or Symantec; and will be available from NetApp in the summer. Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware is a stand-alone product for the ESX hypervisor through the VMware Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) framework.
For more information, go to the Symantec website at www.symantec.com.