Hifn, the catalyst behind storage and networking innovation, today announced that its award-winning Swarm Series has been certified with VMware ESX 3.5 and VMware ESX 3i, expanding the customer options for iSCSI SAN storage in a VMware virtual environment.

Hifn’s Swarm Series Software  is now listed in the VMware “Storage/SAN Compatibility Guide For ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i”, highlighting the Swarm’s functionality and support for three VMware environments: ESX 3.5, ESX 3i Embedded and ESX 3i Server Installable. The VMware Storage/SAN Compatibility Guide enables VMware users to quickly determine which storage solutions have passed the company’s stringent requirements for iSCSI SAN connectivity and compatibility with hosts running VMware ESX 3.x environments.

“Hifn’s certification gives customers an officially sanctioned option for creating a fully virtualized infrastructure under VMware without the complexity and cost of a Fibre Channel SAN,” said John Matze, Vice President Business Development at Hifn. “iSCSI SAN technology, combined with the full-featured data protection suite built into every Swarm system, have made it affordable for small and medium businesses to take full advantage of a VMware virtualized server and storage environment. We expect VMware deployments to play an increasingly important role for us and our customers.”

Amcom Software, the leader in mission-critical communications, is one of the first Hifn customers to deploy the Swarm appliance in a VMware Infrastructure environment. The company selected a Hifn Swarm system as part of a data center server and storage consolidation project implemented with VMware Infrastructure 3. Amcom chose the Hifn Swarm to meet its stringent data center requirements for assured data availability and reliability based on the high-availability design with standard RAID 6 and RAID 61 data protection with active/active failover, multiple data paths to the storage, and the integrated remote data replication feature.