XenSource and iSCSI Storage Partners Team to Reduce the Complexity and Cost of Disaster Recovery for Virtualization

April 23, 2007; 07:02 AM
XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen™ hypervisor, today announced partnerships with several of the leading storage vendors to boost the comprehensive iSCSI storage support, included in its recently released XenEnterprise 3.2. 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. 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.

Recent analyst reports show iSCSI adoption is growing dramatically in 2007. Important for many different types of data-intensive applications, XenSource virtualization products help offer dramatically reduced server hardware and operating costs through server consolidation and the resulting savings on power, space, cooling, and system maintenance. The addition of iSCSI to XenSource products begins to bridge the gap that exists between server and storage management. 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.”

“Compellent continues to lead the industry in providing seamless, cross-platform support for iSCSI and server virtualization technologies to reduce the cost and administrative burden of managing enterprise storage,” said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing for Compellent. “Pairing XenSource open-source virtualization products with Compellent’s native disk virtualization makes it easy to consolidate servers and storage while bringing about instant disaster recovery benefits.”

"LeftHand Networks iSCSI SANs are ideal for virtual data center environments," said Karl Chen, vice president of business development and alliances. "Combining LeftHand's open iSCSI SAN with XenEnterprise 3.2 will provide joint customers with the ease-of-use and cost-effectiveness of virtualization in both their server and storage environments."

“QLogic iSCSI HBAs are optimized to deliver on the performance requirements for server virtualization,” said Herman Chao, director, Ethernet product marketing at QLogic. “QLogic’s industry leading SANblade® HBAs provide a high performance IP SAN solution capable of IPv6 and storage boot that are a natural complement to XenEnterprise 3.2.”

Benefits of using iSCSI with XenSource virtualization products include:

• Simpler Disaster Recovery – offering replication capabilities of iSCSI storage systems to enable recovery from system and site failures.
• Easier Backup and Restore – providing network-based storage snapshots to allow IT organizations to offload backup and keep server resources dedicated to users and applications.
• Consolidation of storage – enabling centralized hardware to support multiple servers reducing costs of acquisition and management.
• Virtualization of storage – ensuring the right level of performance and data protection can be delivered to each virtual server according to its business value transparently.

XenSource virtualization products include the Software iSCSI Initiator which allows any machine with a standard NIC to connect to iSCSI based storage arrays, as well as robust hardware iSCSI support using QLogic host bus adapters that offload iSCSI processing from the system CPU to a dedicated card to provide the highest levels of iSCSI performance. These capabilities will enable upcoming support of live migration of virtual machines between systems, high availability of virtual machines between physical systems, and more integrated backups.

“Just as customers are looking for more affordable, more scalable options for virtualization, we are seeing an increased need to find simpler, more cost-effective comprehensive solutions for storage,” said Roger Klorese, sr. director of product marketing at XenSource. “iSCSI support expands on our ‘ten minutes to Xen’ simplicity charter, and our partnerships with leading vendors greatly increase the accessibility to and interoperability of these solutions. Integration with iSCSI storage brings the business continuity benefits of the storage network, such as storage snapshots and off-host/off-site backup, to users of XenSource virtualization solutions.”

About XenSource Virtualization Products

For customers seeking to reduce the number of under-utilized servers in their IT infrastructure, XenSource virtualization products help dramatically reduce server hardware and operating costs through savings on power, space, cooling, and system maintenance. Offering high performance virtualization at an affordable price, XenSource supports both Windows and Linux servers. XenSource products are based on the Xen™ hypervisor, and offer easy to use Windows and Linux virtualization solutions with built-in virtual machine lifecycle management, at breakthrough price and performance. XenSource products are being adopted worldwide in enterprises to increase server utilization, support server consolidation, and reduce total cost of ownership.

About XenSource

XenSource, Inc. develops the XenServer™ product family based on the industry’s highest-performance virtualization technology, the open source Xen™ hypervisor. For customers seeking to reduce the number of under-utilized servers in their IT infrastructure, XenSource virtualization products help dramatically reduce server hardware and operating costs through savings on power, space, cooling, and system maintenance. Offering high performance virtualization, XenSource supports both Windows and Linux servers. Founded and run by the Xen development team, XenSource products are being adopted worldwide in enterprises to increase server utilization, support server consolidation, and reduce total cost of ownership. For more information, visit http://www.xensource.com.

XenSource, Xen, XenEnterprise, XenServer and XenExpress are trademarks of XenSource, Inc. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.