EMC Ties Storage to VMware APIs

EMC is introducing three new approaches to integatring storage with the new VMware VSphere 4.1 cloud-based virtualization environment, officially released today.

Now delivering more than 55 integration points with VMware solutions, EMC says the new integrations will “dramatically improve” storage efficiency for VSphere users as they create  virtual machines.

EMC supports three APIs for the latest version of VSphere. Known collectively as VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), the APIs can offload specific storage operations to EMC arrays.

For the Full Copy API, EMC delivers hardware-accelerated copying of data by performing all operations on the array. As a result, EMC says customers can achieve up to 10 times faster virtual machine creation and data movement. For the Block Zero API, EMC delivers hardware-accelerated initialization, which the company says reduces input/output by up to a factor of 10 for common tasks such as creating new virtual machines. EMC is positioning this feature as suited to creating fault-tolerant (FT)-enabled or thinly provisioned virtual machines.

And for the Hardware Assisted Locking API, EMC delivers improved locking controls on the vSphere Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) cluster file system. EMC says this approach allows users to store up to 10 times as many virtual machines per datastore and to boot virtual machines up to four times faster.

EMC is expanding on an existing set of software for integrating with vSphere APIs and free plug-ins to the VMware vCenter server solution.