Just in time for this year’s VMworld, leading analyst firm Wikibon conducted a survey of the external storage solutions deployed at VMware customer environments. This year the report has been updated to reflect features/functions available in vSphere 5.1 and factors their importance as customers rank each VMware integration value to them in their day to day operation of a VMware vSphere environment. “Why is this important?” The answer is that, once again, customers surveyed agree that EMC has the best integration with VMware vSphere 5.1. EMC walked away with the top spot across every one of their storage array categories. Here’s one of the handsome family portraits. The full report is here.
The study examined 13 arrays from 6 vendors ranging from Tier 1 to Tier 3 storage offerings: Dell (2), EMC (3), Hitachi (2), HP (2), IBM (3) and NetApp (1). But not all arrays are created equal, so one might ask if the research is comparing apples to oranges? To clear that up, the Wikibon study has produced several groupings to reflect the various types of storage arrays the 13 arrays comprise:
EMC integrations with vSphere provide vSphere administrators the ability to quickly determine where the most demanding workloads are located – and help them identify which storage pools require attention to avoid slowdowns or downtime due to insufficient storage capacity or throughput. Bottom line: EMC storage integrations enable them to increase the efficiency of the storage resource utilization in their virtualized data center.
But there is so much more to be excited about. In addition to the integrations which EMC has implemented for vSphere 5.1, we plan to release even more integrations later this year:
- First up will be the release of EMC Storage Analytics 2.0 (ESA) which expands beyond the previously released edition of ESA by adding support for VMAX. This provides the vSphere Admin with improved visibility and troubleshooting diagnostic capabilities for both VNX and VMAX storage.
- Additional security capabilities are planned with the integration of RSA technology with vSphere 5.5 including the Loginsight and Cloud Network and Security offerings.
- With the announcement of vCloud Hybrid Services by VMware, EMC is also adding even more services offerings to help customers transition their private cloud environments to this new service provider solution. EMC Consulting will be offering these services as “Hybrid Cloud Automated Services.”
- Last but certainly not least, the much anticipated release of EMC ViPR which is scheduled to be available later this year. ViPR will be engineered to include integration with VMware Management offerings such as vCAC, vCO and VCD – designed to enable faster provisioning and new levels of automation to benefit the day to day job of the vSphere Administrators.
With exciting news of joint collaboration with VMware on new server based storage infrastructure, this week at VMworld in San Francisco promises to be awesome!