EMC Corp. today announced that the first upgrade of its EMC Invista networked
storage virtualization tool will feature the ability to integrate with VMWare
virtual servers.

The upgrade, which comes more than two years after Invista was first introduced,
has been certified for use with VMware's ESX virtual server in VMWare Infrastructure
3 environments, EMC officials said.

The new Invista 2.0 software is currently available and is priced from $100,000,
EMC said.

A slightly different version of the software, dubbed Invista 2.1, which adds
heterogeneous mirroring and storage pooling capabilities, will be released before
the end of 2007, said Colin Bailey, director of software product marketing for
Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC.

Bailey said Invista 2.0 offers improved I/O throughput and scalability compared
to the initial version. He said the upgraded technology doubles the number of
virtual volumes - or what's presented to the host machine - from 4,000 to 8,000
and can support 40 simultaneous mobility sessions, five time more than the previous
version.

Invista 2.0 also adds new links to EMC's Replication Manager to automate and
provide context around Invista clones in VMWare deployments. "We want to
bring together the virtualization of servers combined with the virtualization
of storage," remarked Bailey.

Mike Rubesch, executive director of IT systems and operations at Purdue University,
in West Lafayette, Indiana, has been running Invista 2.0 in tandem with VMware
virtualization software since August. Purdue runs 150 VMware virtual servers
and about 350 physical Microsoft Windows and Unix-based servers.

Rubesch said the upgraded Invista software has eased the process of managing
the school's 220TB and 600 fabric switch port architecture by its two storage
administrators.

"As we grew, our system administrators had to pick up more and more storage
activity." he said. "That required zoning new storage to servers,
doing server copies and redoing applications so you're looking at new storage.
[Now] you zone it once to Invista and it takes care of" assigning storage.

Rubesch estimated Purdue's storage needs are growing by about 40% a year, which
forced IT officials to re-think how physical storage is managed, and how it
could better utilize virtualization technology.

"We didn't have a rational tiered storage approach," he said. "We
didn't have the tools to move things around easily. That's going to be very
important to us. I look at [Invista] as a way to make this a lot less painful."

Rubesch said, however, that the new version does not let EMC Control Center
recognize Invista virtual targets. "That's something [EMC] will have to
address," he added.

The distributed Cluster Control Path (CPC) of Invista 2.0 has been tweaked
to enhance availability and failover by separating the CPC's physical components
by up to 1000 feet, Bailey said. Additionally, RAID-1 mirroring has been added
to the virtualization tool, he added.

The Invista framework also leverages SAN switches from Cisco Systems Inc. and
Brocade Communications Systems Inc. to push IOs to multi-vendor storage environments
through what is described as a split path architecture. Bailey said about 200
customers are currently running Invista.

» posted by abennett

Computerworld

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