PALO ALTO, Calif. — XenSource, Inc. is partnering with several leading storage vendors to boost the iSCSI storage support in its products, including the recently released XenEnterprise 3.2 open source virtualization software.
XenSource’s iSCSI support brings the benefits of high-end SANs to a larger audience, complementing dedicated Fibre Channel networking and delivering disaster recovery capabilities for virtualized environments, the company said.
New and expanded partnerships with NetApp, Compellent, LeftHand Networks and QLogic will further facilitate virtualization adoption and provide a broad array of interoperable storage options for users.
The addition of iSCSI to XenSource products begins to bridge the gap that exists between server and storage management, said the company. By implementing iSCSI, end users can enable high performance storage and disaster recovery at a fraction of the cost of competing technologies such as Fibre Channel.
“When end-users are undertaking a storage consolidation effort, they are looking for a storage topology that delivers on the characteristics of the utility model. iSCSI meets their expectations by dramatically reducing the cost to procure, manage, and provision an IP SAN environment,” said Patrick Rogers, vice-president of solutions marketing at Network Appliance.
“We expect the general adoption of 10Gb Ethernet will fuel the growth of the iSCSI market even further, and we have seen a steady growth in IP SAN deployment from organizations that are looking at simplified business continuity solutions, which they can easily integrate into their existing application environment. We expect XenSource’s support of iSCSI in their virtualization solutions to fuel this adoption even further.”
Benefits of using iSCSI with XenSource virtualization products are said to include simpler disaster recovery, easier backup and restore, consolidation of storage and virtualization of storage.