BridgeSTOR for VMware appliances address branch office and small and medium business storage needs by coupling in-line, no-performance-compromise data compression and deduplication with simplified administration, rapid deployment and an affordable price tag. It provides enterprise-class data protection and management features, solid performance, scalability and optional fault-tolerance with 10,000 RPM SAS disk drives to deliver iSCSI SAN shared storage support for multiple ESX and ESXi servers and up to 50 running Virtual Machines (VM) and Virtual Desktop Interfaces (VDI).

The VMware vSphere Essentials Kit adds vSphere 4.1 vCenter Server management functionality to BridgeSTOR for VMware IP SAN management and data protection.

VS-ADR combines in-line, ASIC-assisted block-level data compression and deduplication for VMware templates, images and application data. Typical data reduction ratios for a combination of Linux and Windows Virtual Machine OS images range from 35% to 60%. BridgeSTOR for VMware is capacity-optimized iSCSI or NAS storage (with optional high availability) optimized for use in a VMware vSphere 4.1 environment with up to 50 live virtual machines running capacity-intensive applications with mid-range IOPS requirements. Examples of applications for which the BridgeSTOR for VMware IP storage appliances are ideally suited for include Cloud Storage, data mining, data warehousing, general business, R&D, geo-seismic, archive, VMware infrastructure and shared home directory applications.

Unlike storage that does not include VS-ADR, BridgeSTOR deduplication and compression reduce the storage capacity needs of applications and significantly reduce the capacity requirements of VMware infrastructures including template storage and “standby” VMs.

BridgeSTOR for VMware provides an integrated shared storage capability that supports the following VMware-specific storage features:

1. vMotion
2. Storage vMotion
3. DRS and HA clustering
4. Volume Grow (by enabling dynamic LUN resizing on BridgeSTOR and increasing the size of the VMware DataSTOR (VMFS) “live”)
5. Virtual and physical RAW LUN support

BridgeSTOR for VMware supports the following VMware IP storage features:

1. Multi-pathing (round robin)
2. CHAP multi-directional (initiator/storage authentication)
3. Dynamic (iSNS) and static discovery
4. Storage Controller failover support in high availability configurations

VMware Data Recovery (vDR)

VMware Data Recovery is a disk-based backup and recovery product for VMware vSphere 4.x environments that provides data protection for virtual machines. vDR is the successor to the VMware Consolidated Backup product. vDR is fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server to enable centralized scheduling of backup jobs.

BridgeSTOR AOS for VMware Appliances operate in conjunction with VMware Data Recovery to deliver a robust solution to backup for VMware machines and remote data replication for disaster recovery. The BridgeSTOR appliance is an ideal place to store virtual machines that are protected using VMware’s vDR or as the vDR repository itself by configuring an iSCSI Volume on the SAN or a NAS CIFS share on the network.

vDR performs data deduplication using in-line block-based technology developed by VMware. VMware supports 3^rd party deduplication and compression for vDR data as long as the storage devices are listed in the VMware storage compatibility matrix. (The BridgeSTOR AOS for VMware Virtualization is listed in the VMware storage compatibility matrix.)

BridgeSTOR AOS for VMware Virtualization uses VS-ADR to further reduce vDR datasets, typically by 15% to 25%.