EMC, VMware tighten storage integration

BOSTON — Yesterday at EMC World, the focus was on virtualization and private cloud. Today the spotlight is shining on EMC’s bread and butter, storage, but there’s still some virtualization news to report.

EMC made two announcements about improving storage integration with VMware. First, you can now manage its CLARiiON and Celerra storage lines through vCenter. Using vCenter plugins, you can provision block and NAS storage on the same console you use to manage your virtual infrastructure. These plugins have been available for other EMC storage lines, but this is the first time CLARiiON and Celerra are getting in on the fun.

CLARiiON and Celerra now also support VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration, or VAAI. As EMC’s Rich Napolitano explained at a press conference this morning, there are some functions that your storage system can handle more efficiently than your virtual servers and their hosts can. VAAI moves these tasks from the host to the storage system to perform those functions faster — and free up resources for your virtual servers.

These two new features will be available for current CLARiiON CX4 and Celerra NS products in the third quarter, EMC says.