StorMagic Supports vSphere 4

StorMagic announced that the StorMagic SvSAN storage virtual appliance is supporting VMware vSphere 4, which includes VMware ESX and VMware ESXi. Qualified users can get a free copy of the SvSAN for management of up to 2 TB and with no expiration date by visiting the StorMagic booth at VMworld 2009, August 31 through September 3, in San Francisco, Calif. At VMworld 2009, StorMagic is also sponsoring a ‘Crack-the-Vault’ contest that gives attendees an opportunity to win $10,000 in cash, and also learn how they could save thousands of dollars.

The StorMagic SvSAN is designed to enable the deployment of a high-availability shared storage solution for less than $2,000, allowing VMware vSphere 4 users to take advantage of enhanced server virtualization functions without the need to purchase expensive shared storage.

Introduced in April 2009, VMware vSphere 4 is the industry’s leading virtualization platform, transforming datacenters into dramatically simplified cloud infrastructures to enable the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services. VMware vSphere 4 is the most cost-effective way for small businesses to enable ‘Always On IT’ – the high availability, reliability, and manageability of enterprise-class operations optimized for small and midsized businesses.

"With its support for VMware vSphere 4, the StorMagic SvSAN can now better manage our infrastructure as an efficient, flexible and dynamic virtualized environment," said Kim Tauchen, director of operations/IT at Direct Enterprises, Inc. "Smaller companies like ours have similar needs to the enterprise, so to have an option like the SvSAN that cost-effectively delivers enterprise-class features is terrific."

“Customers are responsive, in part because they are now able to create, manage, and provision storage in their VMware environments through a user-friendly console,” said Scott Brousse, chief technology officer at PBG. “On top of this, the StorMagic solution allows them to build a business continuity plan, knowing that they can get the simplicity they want without giving up high availability – through rapid and automated failover – and performance.”

“We are now offering VMware users storage virtual appliances to manage the storage infrastructures of virtualized environments,” said Mike Stolz, vice president of marketing at StorMagic. “We launched SvSAN a few months ago, and the interest we have experienced from the VMware community is amazing. Our tests in real-world environments have shown that the SvSAN addresses the shared storage needs of SMBs and remote office environments, and delivers similar performance to external storage with a comparable number of disk drives.”

StorMagic SvSAN includes features users would expect from an enterprise-class SAN and provides optional licenses for high availability and capacity management. By turning unused storage capacity into a virtual SAN, the solution is designed to enable users to take advantage of advanced features of VMware environments such as VMware High Availability (HA), VMware VMotion and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), without the need for an external SAN. StorMagic SvSAN is also designed to work with VMware vCenter Server, so that administrators are able to manage datastores, the StorMagic iSCSI SAN, and the internal RAID controller from within the VMware vSphere Client and VMware vCenter Server.

With capacity that starts at 2 TB and scales to unlimited storage, the SvSAN enables administrators to create, manage and provision datastores through a single-step process, which allows them to rapidly deploy datastores without managing multiple applications. Add-on features include active-active mirroring for high-availability and capacity management upgrades.