VMware announced that it is expanding its hardware certification program to include storage virtualization devices.

The virtualization company has been making an attempt to attract more business from the SMB market, an area where server virtualization competitors have been trying to make inroads against the market leader. One common complaint being made by SMBs is the fact that ESX Server does have a strict hardware compatibility list when it comes to server hardware. So the question does need to get raised, will this additional HCL in storage hurt the SMB market?

VMware says this program is designed to enable customers to have more choice in deploying virtualized storage solutions with VMware Infrastructure. Parag Patel, vice president of alliances at VMware said, "VMware is committed to working with our storage partners to offer customers the greatest choice of storage vendors when deploying virtualization across their organization's infrastructure."

Already, some of the world's largest network storage system vendors have signed on to attain their certification for their storage offerings later this year. This list includes VMware parent company EMC as well as Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM and Network Appliance.

Patel went on to say, "VMware Infrastructure leverages and drives significant new adoption of iSCSI and fibre channel SANs with its native capabilities for distributed volume management, VMware VMotion and rapid application recovery. Many customers are looking to implement network-based storage virtualization as their VMware environments continue to grow in order to optimize the storage resources that support these new capabilities. This new certification program is designed to fully support this capability by leveraging the native capabilities of VMware Infrastructure."

VMware said that the new program to certify storage virtualization devices is another step forward in VMware's ongoing efforts to work with the storage industry to bring server and storage virtualization together to improve customers' flexibility, efficiency and total cost of ownership.

Posted by David Marshall on September 29, 2007 10:57 AM