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Live from VMworld: Page 5 of 7

Virtensys is an I/O
Virtualization solution. Think of your typical server rack; each server
has multiple network cards and multiple storage HBAs. In addition they
might have specialized cards that do deduplication or compression. The
problem is that not all of these servers can justify the bandwidth made
available by high end cards. With Virtensys you could put a PCIe card
(or two for redundancy) in each physical server and run one cable to
the Virtensys top of rack switch which could contain multiple 10GB
Ethernet, FCoE, 8GB fibre or any other PCIe adapter. The switch then
allows the I/O to be shared across those 16 machines. Further it lets
you present multiple virtual NICS or HBAs to each physical server. Then
in the VMware use case you can assign these virtual NICS to specific
virtual machines.

The payoff is a significant reduction in
cabling costs and even more importantly a significant reduction in NIC
and HBA costs. This is especially true when you factor in the need for
redundant cards. In a 8 server rack you would have 8 secondary HBAs and
8 secondary NICs. Compare that to the cost of one extra of each type
that effectively acts as a global spare.Pivot 3 is reversing the
trend that I see in some companies who are putting storage appliances
on VMware. What if you went the opposite direction and started using
the excess compute resources on the storage system to host virtual
machines? That would reduce data center footprint!

Pivot 3 is a
grid based storage system using multiple Intel based nodes with
internal storage that are clustered together to present a single
storage array to attached servers, except those servers can be on the
nodes as well. The ideal market is storage capacity heavy VMs as
opposed to compute heavy VMs. There is a lot of these workloads; backup
servers, Exchange, Sharpoint or even for DR. When you need to support
compute heavy VMs those can be put on an external physical server but
still leverage the cluster for storage as well as an emergency Vmotion
target.

Marathon

offers high availability simplified in a Citrix XEN Environment, ideal
for the small business. It allows the SMB to implement cost effective
server virtualization via XEN and then with Marathon's everRun,
interconnect another physical server via a dedicated link, for complete
virtualized server redundancy.

You can do this in different
sites but it has to be close by since the communication is
synchronous.Commvault Using the
conference to emphasize their virtualization support. A lot of the hype
of Simpona 8 was on deduplication; virtualization was missed in the
discussion. Off host backup was through VCB. Nothing new there, but
what is unique is the block level incremental capabilities, so only the
changed blocks within the virtual machine need to be backed up. They
also have the ability to auto-discover newly added VM's throughout the
lifecycle of virtual machines. When a new virtual machine is introduced
it is automatically added to a default virtual machine backup job.