DataCore Software announced that its two storage virtualization solutions, SANsymphony and SANmelody, have been verified as Citrix Ready for XenServer 4.1 as virtual SAN appliances running on XenServer virtual machines as well as in a standard physical storage server configuration. Rigorous testing verified that both implementations will support XenServer 4.1 virtual machines with virtual storage and advanced storage services critical to demanding virtual server environments, such as fail-safe data protection, high availability mirroring, disaster recovery replication, SANmotion data migration, thin provisioning storage pools and high speed caching for performance acceleration.

Emulex announced that its LightPulse family of 8Gb/s and 4Gb/s Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) support Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and its new Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) feature. PRO, coupled with Emulex's management pack for PRO, enables administrators to monitor and control the allocation of virtualized servers connected to a storage area network (SAN). This enables customers to manage the performance of their virtualized infrastructure. Emulex's management pack for PRO provides Virtual Machine Manager with the I/O connectivity information needed to improve the placement and migration of virtual machines based on storage requirements and available resources.

DataCore Software announced that DDI Health in Australia has selected, deployed and is realizing notable benefits from DataCore's SANmelody virtual SAN software to manage its storage and support its software development servers and VMware systems. DDI Health produces a range of solutions across the diagnostic health services sector. The company was grappling with wasted disk space, 'out of disk space' warnings that force systems and applications to be shut down to add more disks and constant disk provisioning issues. Whereas one set of servers would be full, another set would have disk space to spare, thereby making the provisioning of disk space between systems an on-going and fairly labor-intensive undertaking. With SANmelody in place to allocate disk space to physical and virtual servers as well as workstations, the administration team's disk management headache has disappeared. Now there is very little wasted disk space. Not only had disk administration been labor-intensive, it was also fairly problematic and the resulting downtime was very disruptive to daily operations.

Making changes in a Storage Area Network (SAN) is a daily chore for many enterprise IT administrators, but so is the risk of prolonged downtime associated with configuration errors or incompatibilities in hardware or software. A popular refrain heard from industry analysts and IT consultants is that the number one cause of downtime in the data center is due to change management errors. The thinking is that undisciplined IT changes often cause problems that result in downtime. And with the size and complexity of SANs growing - especially as enterprises deploy heterogeneous environments - the downtime risks loom even larger.

Linux vendor Red Hat has made its first move beyond its core OS business: it is now also entering the storage software market. The first product is a new storage solution called the Red Hat Global File System (GFS).

Aimed at small-to-medium size businesses and based on a unique patent-pending design and technology, EMC has launched a customer-installable networked storage system capable of storing up to three terabytes of information with integrated functions for simple management and advanced protection.

Since 1986, the environmental organization Greenpeace UK has relied on e-mail to support its campaigns, but its existing servers couldn't cope, so it has turned to a Linux-based SAN solution to guarantee that its environmental work can continue electronically and reliably.