In-Band's Virtual Song

5:35 PM -- While intelligent switch-based storage virtualization waits for a jumpstart in the market, network-based virtualization keeps moving steadily along.

Consider the following: IBM's SAN Volume Controller (SVC) is the most popular storage virtualization appliance out there, and now DataCore's SANsymphony is becoming more enterprise-ready to give it a run. (See IBM's Got Virtual Vision.)

These products -- as well as FalconStor's IPStor -- run on servers that sit in the network, or in-band. That's a different tack than EMC Invista, Fujitsu Eternus, Incipient Network Storage Platform (NSP), and LSI Logic Storage Virtualization Manager (SVM) take. (See Virtualization Buyers Keep Exit Open and A Baby Step for Storage Virtualization.) Those products sit outside the data path and work in conjunction with intelligent switches.

The network-based guys, particularly IBM, got out first but had a problem scaling because a second device added to the network didn't see the same pool as the first box. That made them limited as enterprise plays.

DataCore is making a run at solving that problem with the latest version of SANsymphony, which has features such as N+1 availability, support for multi-path I/O drivers that allow use of Fibre Channel and iSCSI paths for failover, and thin provisioning.At least one analyst who saw DataCore as a high-volume low-end play until now says the new features should make SANsymphony enterprise-ready. "DataCore graduated into an enterprise storage virtualization player with this release," Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group says. "I had always shoved them into the SMB category before."

DataCore isn't home free yet with SANsymphony. It still has to prove itself in the field, convince customers to use its software instead of IBM's, and eventually hold off switch-based virtualization. Still, it's not bad for a company that was on wobbly legs a few years back. (See DataCore Sacks Some Sales Staffers.)

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch