Seagate Technology, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced that its Enterprise Performance 15K HDD and its 1200 SSD 12Gb/s SAS drives have been certified by VMware as interoperable storage tiers for VMware Virtual SAN. An industry first, Seagate 12Gb/s hard disk drives (HDD) and solid state drives (SSD) now support Virtual SAN for VMware vSphere, a new hypervisor-converged storage platform, delivering the benefits of faster, more reliable and cost-effective shared data for traditional data centers and emerging cloud infrastructures.

“We congratulate Seagate for obtaining VMware Virtual SAN certification,” said Gaetan Castelein, senior director, storage and availability, VMware. “We look forward to continuing our work with Seagate to deliver 12Gb/s technology that provides efficient, reliable and scaleable solutions for customers.”

With VMware Virtual SAN certification for 12 Gb/s SAS HDDs and SSDs, Seagate drives went through a rigorous certification process to ensure that the overall solution meets VMware Virtual SAN customer requirements. Upon certification, the drives are validated to take advantage of all VMware Virtual SAN benefits including high performance and radically simplified storage.

“We are pleased to partner with VMware to provide a path for the future with 12Gb/s support for VMware in data centers,” said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing. “The only VMware certified 12Gb/s solution in the industry, these drives coupled with the VMware vSphere platform deliver the optimum performance in terms of speed, scalability and efficiency— a winning combination that will enable us to provide unparalleled performance.”

“Lenovo enterprise customers demand cutting-edge storage technology and Seagate’s 12Gb/s SAS delivers just that, providing high-performance and robust enterprise reliability that they can trust,” said Darrel Ward, vice president, enterprise storage, enterprise business group, Lenovo. “VMware’s certification of this technology only reinforces our assertion that Seagate is a technology leader when it comes to storage solutions.”

A step forward in scale-out storage architectures, the Seagate Enterprise Performance 15K HDD and Seagate 1200 SSD offer VMware Virtual SAN customers significant benefits of greater scalability and manageability as well as superior reliability and endurance for mission-critical applications. Both family of drives are listed on the VMware Compatibility Guide.