Hedvig Demos VMware Integration and Multi-Site Hybrid Cloud Storage Solutions

Hedvig, Inc. announced the availability of the vSphere Web Client plug-in and enhancements to its Distributed Storage Platform that provide tighter integration with Vmware, Inc.‘s virtualization products.

VMware customers who are pursuing modernization of their IT infrastructure now have access to better HA, disaster avoidance and recovery options built specifically for large, multi-site VMware deployments. The company demonstrated these enhancements at the VMworld 2016 conference on August 28 – September 1, 2016.

As enterprises move from simple virtual server environments to true automated clouds to engage customers, compete globally and generate profits, storage becomes a key consideration. In addition, today’s dynamic business climate demands a more flexible approach to storing and managing data. Firm’s software-defined, distributed systems approach to storage infrastructure enables VMware users to respond and adapt quickly to ever-changing data, application and user requirements.

“The inherent storage constraints in legacy infrastructure still prevent companies from taking advantage of automation and hybrid cloud capabilities that help drive business agility and availability,” said Avinash Lakshman, founder and CEO, Hedvig. “Our expanded partnership and integration with VMware eliminate the storage barrier and empower IT organizations to achieve their goal of delivering infrastructure-as-a-service.“

The company’s Distributed Storage Platform is built to address the needs of automated, API-driven, hybrid-cloud infrastructure by providing scalable, multi-site software-defined storage solution for both hyperscale and hyperconverged deployments. The firm delivers a set of hardware-agnostic storage services that help create future-proof virtual data centers.

Enhancements to the Distributed Storage Platform allow VMware admins to deliver agile infrastructure that responds faster to business demands through the following capabilities:

• Simplify storage management for virtual server deployments at scale: The vSphere Web Client plug-in lets VMware vCenter Server users provision, snapshot, clone, and manage company’s virtual disks as VM datastores. The plug-in reduces the time needed to manage VMware-specific storage operations and enables admins to take advantage of modern storage infrastructure from directly within vSphere.

• Gain improved HA, disaster avoidance and DR: Storage architecture extends VMware deployments beyond one or two data centers with support for three or more active data centers within the same storage cluster. This added functionality boosts application availability and disaster readiness for customers using VMware infrastructure solutions including VMware vMotion, vSphere Metro Storage Clustering, HA, Site Recovery Manager (SRM), and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) in vSphere clouds.

• Eliminate complexity of managing multiple, disparate storage solutions: Adding to existing support a commodity server-based hardware and cloud instances to form a single, software-defined storage system, the firm now also supports virtualization of existing storage assets within a company’s cluster. IT organizations can leverage existing SAN and NAS storage arrays to contribute capacity to a scale-out, software-defined storage deployment. VMware customers can benefit from the flexibility of an elastic, distributed storage platform rather than waiting until the end-of-life of legacy storage systems.

Collectively, these platform capabilities enable VMware teams to cost-optimize storage for diverse workloads and leverage a single storage cluster that spans private and public clouds. They also provide the ability to burst VMs to the public cloud while still storing them in a private datacenter, offering VMware teams the added flexibility to take advantage of public clouds without worrying about lock-in and large-scale data migration. In addition to VMware integration, company’s capabilities include a full-featured REST API and ecosystem integrations like OpenStack Cinder and the Docker Volume API, giving customers wide coverage for existing and future applications.