Raidundant SkySAN Technology Supports Vmware vSphere VAAI

Raidundant LLC announces that SkySAN Technology supports the latest release for VSphere 5.0 VAAI, VMware’s vStorage API for Array Integration to enhance the performance of VMware ESX/ESXi servers.

Raidundant’s SkySAN Technology delivers enterprise class data storage to organizations that require flexible and solutions without the limitations and costs of legacy storage manufacturers.

"Raidundant is committed to providing end-users with the highest levels of simplicity in managing virtualized data storage in SMB and enterprise environments alike," said Annie Parkhurst, Director of Sales, Raidundant. "The development of our VDC plugin for vSphere VAAI works seamlessly with SkySAN’s standard features like inline deduplication, thin provisioning and inherent virtualization tools that manage extremely scalable storage at the core of virtualized networks," Ms. Parkhurst added.

With SkySAN Command Virtual Data Center and vSphere VAAI users can reduce storage requirements in VDI deployments by freeing up space on the back end through SCSI UNMAP, allowing for the shrinking of thin provisioned volumes. Combined with cloning and inline deduplication and compression, some users have seen more than a 100-to-one reduction in space for VDI when using Raidundant SkySAN technology.

SkySAN Command Virtual Data Center allows storage administrators to see their entire virtual environment and to provision storage and storage policies, including backup, replication, and retention policies from a simple point-and-click interface.

SkySAN Command management suite supports four new SCSI commands: Write Same, Unmap, ATS and Block Copy. All provide performance within VMware operations when using SkySAN as primary iSCSI or FC storage.

SkySAN Command Virtual Data Center plugin was designed with the new VAAI features in mind that allow users to enable a number of storage related operations, such as initializing a virtual disk and cloning a virtual machine, to be offloaded from the ESX/ESXi host to the array controller.

By intelligently offloading operations from the ESX/ESXi host Raidundant developers optimized SkySAN Command management to improve the CPU cycles for applications while improving the overall utilization.

"With Raidundant’s SkySAN technology and the new release from VMware, administrators who implement VAAI can see up to 10x faster performance in VM operations," noted Murat Karslioglu, Raidundant Chief Technology Officer and lead VMware/Raidundant solution developer.