EMC's Invista eyes storage virtualisation

EMC has joined the storage virtualisation pack, unveiling its Invista Network Storage Virtualization Platform at its annual user conference.

"EMC views network storage virtualisation as a key enabling technology to address customer challenges such as the inability to schedule planned downtime, the constraints of inflexible storage infrastructures, and the need to simplify management of complex storage environments," EMC's executive vice-president and chief development officer, Mark Lewis, said.

Invista, which is Italian for "in sight", will not ship until July, but EMC now has an official product to put up against the Enterprise Virtualization Array from HP, Hitachi's virtualised TagmaStore system, and IBM's SAN Volume Controller. Like those products, Invista creates an abstract view of disks in a SAN and helps to make logical unit number management simpler.

Unlike the storage virtualisation products from Hitachi and IBM, Invista runs out of band, which means the process of mapping logical addresses takes place in SAN switches from Brocade Communications Systems, Cisco Systems, and, beginning in 2006, McData. HP, Hitachi, and IBM place the process of mapping either within the array or in the data path.

In other virtualisation news, HP upgraded its Enterprise Virtualization Arrays with new replication features. HP added Snapclone, which makes copies of disks for long-term preservation, and Snapshot, which creates short-lived images of disks for backup.

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