I've had the pleasure of meeting DataCore's CEO, George Teixeira, at a recent trade show event.  And yes, he was working the trade show booth!  Teixeira is extremely knowledgeable and very passionate about his market, and a very friendly and personable man as well.   Find out more, read this latest interview done with TechWorld magazine:

There are three and a half main players in storage area network (SAN) storage virtualization: DataCore, HDS, IBM and EMC. DataCore's is a software-only model, running on industry-standard X86 hardware, either as a Windows app' or as a virtual machine in a variety of virtual server environments.

The other three are controller-based: IBM with its proprietary hardware SAN Volume Controller (SVC); HDS with its proprietary vitalizing array controller, the USP-V; and EMC with its SAN fabric director-based InVista. The main three: DataCore; HDS; and IBM, have sold thousands of copies of their products. EMC has, apparently, only sold somewhere in the low hundreds which is unusual for such a usually energetic company.

The oddity of this is emphasized by DataCore's SANsymphony being available packaged as a virtual server application in EMC's VMware (as a virtual machine or VM) whereas InVista is not.

Techworld spoke with George Teixeira, DataCore's CEO, about the SAN storage virtualization market and about DataCore's intentions.

Techworld: How do you view IBM's SVC?

GT: It's a proprietary hardware base for the software. They could move it to X86 hardware if they wanted to. IBM has lots of excellent engineers. SVC is a drag-along. They get money by selling their hardware. Most SVC sales are in to existing IBM accounts.

Our resellers that also resell IBM tell us that unless it's an existing IBM account they won't even propose it.

IBM seems to be in a position where it's hard to move forward. They still don't have thin provisioning in their product. This lateness is pretty apparent in the industry.

Techworld: How do you view EMC's InVista?

GT: There's no energy behind InVista. It hasn't got thin provisioning. I think their model is to keep the storage intelligence in the storage controller. InVista is more of a routing mechanism. It does routing but storage control is in the storage controller itself.

If you have DataCore then you can use commodity disk and don't need clever controllers. EMC's model is to sell more clever controller disk arrays.

Read the rest of the interview at TechWorld, here.