DataCore Software, a leader in Software-Defined Storage and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN solutions, today announced universal vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVols) support which extends the scope and impact of this important industry advance. Many administrators crave the power and fine-grain control promised by vSphere Virtual Volumes; however, most current storage arrays and systems do not support it or are not currently certified as VVol capable. This powerful new capability enabled by DataCore allows VMware’s VVols benefits to work universally across all kinds of storage. With DataCore enabled, VMware vSphere administrators can self-provision virtual volumes from virtual storage pools -- and can instantly specify the capacity and class of service needed for their applications without having to know anything about the storage or underlying hardware. The new capability is already shipping and comes included within the current release of DataCore’s VMware certified SANsymphony-V Software-Defined Storage and DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN

“At The Biodesign Institute, the new universal VVol capability has allowed us to leverage several different types of storage systems behind DataCore SANsymphony-V,” said Scott LeComte, associate director of IT at The Biodesign Institute - Arizona State University. “We have XIO storage for primary volumes and those are mirrored to less expensive Dell MD storage that has allowed us to decrease our overall cost to secure and manage large data sets for extremely long periods of time. VVols enable us to easily manage and provision volumes in a rapidly changing research environment.”

With DataCore, administrators can deploy virtual drives via the vSphere interface from any storage hardware (disk subsystems, flash / SSD arrays, DAS, etc.). As a result, these customers can now benefit from VVols on platforms including the broad range of EMC, IBM, HDS, Dell, XIO, NetApp and other popular storage systems and all flash arrays (Pure Storage, Nimble, etc.) by layering the SANsymphony-V Software-Defined Storage platform in front of them. The same is true for direct-attached storage (DAS) pooled by the DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN.

DataCore’s unique implementation of VVols also enables customers to realize its benefits on legacy storage and arrays that are not slotted to receive VVols until next year or beyond -- allowing un-certified storage gear to receive the benefit today. In addition, DataCore also provides vSphere tools that enable Hyper-converged systems to be set up automatically and configured on ESXi clusters with the DataCore Virtual SAN.