ONStor announced it has been awarded certification for interoperability with the VMware server virtualization software platform. Confirming the ability of VMware virtual machines (VMs) to operate on ONStor storage devices, this certification assures customers that both companies are committed to an ongoing partnership, including providing technical support and proactive qualification to support customers' deployments.

"VMware users can now confidently deploy ONStor storage to complement their virtualized server environments," said George Crump, president and senior analyst, Storage Switzerland. "It's a best-of-breed pairing that maximizes the potential of data center consolidation. ONStor's virtualized platform brings to storage all the analogous benefits of server virtualization with which VMware users are familiar."

The VMware certification aligns ONStor with a Tier One server virtualization provider, expands the company's customer prospect pool, and ties storage consolidation -- a key component in data center consolidation -- to the server consolidation trend. Deploying a virtualized machine environment on an ONStor virtualized network storage environment maximizes the operational efficiency benefits a data center can achieve.

VMware virtualized server environments consist of two elements: VMs, which behave as a file, and the data associated with those VMs. Both of these elements can operate on ONStor storage. ONStor provides virtualization at the storage layer that VMware provides at the server layer. For example:

• VMWare VMs simplify application server consolidation, while ONStor Virtual Servers simplify storage server consolidation.
• VMWare V-Motion enables dynamic load balancing for application servers, while ONStor's virtual server mover enables transparent storage workload balancing and migration.
• The VMWare Server Console allows single-pane management of VMWare clusters, while the ONStor NAS Cluster Manager allows single-pane management of ONStor clusters.
• VMWare provides single sign-on authentication and authorization for managing security permissions on application server management, while ONStor security mapping allows single sign-on authentication and authorization for managing security permission on storage servers.
• VMWare supports a wide array of hardware and devices for running applications, while ONStor supports a wide array of storage systems for enterprise file serving.

"This certification will assure enterprises looking to transform their data centers into lean and mean data processing machines that ONStor delivers the ideal networked storage for VMware environments," said Narayan Venkat, vice president, marketing, ONStor.