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Xensource has upped the ante in its battle with VMware for mindshare in the server virtualization market with the announcement that it will incorporate technology from Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation into its XenEnterprise virtualization software. XenEnterprise will incorporate the Symantec technology to directly manage Fibre Channel (FC) storage resources, and will include support for Symantec's Veritas Volume Manager (VVM), which will provide multipath support as well as volume management and snapshot functionality. According to XenSource, the first version of XenEnterprise with the new Symantec features should be released in the fourth quarter of 2007.
"The agreement is a good move for both parties, Symantec and XenSource," says Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst, the StorageIO Group, Stillwater, MN. "If you look at Symantec in the Unix days, they became a de facto standard with VVM and this should continue that trend, especially in virtualization."
John Bara, VP of marketing at XenSource, says the first pieces of Veritas Storage Foundation to be integrated with XenEnterprise will provide storage management and storage virtualization functionality. The two companies intend to eventually provide a full set of data protection features.
Underscoring the companies' commitment to the relationship is the fact that several Symantec engineers have moved to XenSource, either on loan or officially on staff. Ramana Jonnala is a 13-year Veritas (and Symantec) veteran who's now VP of engineering at XenSource. "Many XenSource customers were already using Symantec [Veritas] NetBackup and had requested Fibre Channel functionality through the VVM technology," says Jonnala.
XenSource says the addition of Symantec's storage functionality will help push XenSource into corporate data centers because multipathing offers a level of integrated scalability not currently offered by rivals such as VMware, says Bara. VMware provides this functionality through third-party products, including Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation running on guest instances under VMware, at an extra cost.
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