Last week I went to what I thought at first glimpse was a server trade show - VMworld - and found a storage trade show where vendors were showing off their data protection and disaster recovery wares. I won't be as naive as to say that I didn't expect VMworld to focus so heavily on storage, but there it was - an audience of server admins who knew that in implementing virtualization they had a problem on their hands with the storage their servers were attached to.

How would they protect that data, preserve it for disaster recovery purposes, migrate it and tier it as their server virtualization projects spun out of control? A lot of storage vendors – Asigra, Acronis, Bakbone, NetApp, EMC, among others – stepped in to tell them how. (Compare Storage Virtualization products)

Several vendors, Data Domain and LeftHand Networks, included, told me that many of their greenfield opportunities were from users who were virtualizing their servers and found that they needed ways to virtualize or consolidate their storage. Other vendors such as Symantec, LeftHand and Bakbone told me that users were interested in protecting their data according to the applications generating it – applications like Exchange, Oracle and SQL Server. No surprise there.

VMware too announced a critical piece of its infrastructure – the InfraStructure vServices in the Virtual Data Center OS (VDC-OS) that complements VMware with on-demand provisioning of processing and memory resources to applications. Part of the VDC-OS is vStorage Thin Provisioning and vStorage Linked Clones, which let users reduce their storage capacity by over-provisioning storage resources for virtual machines and by only cloning unique elements of virtual machines to storage. Both will play large parts in the on-premises cloud – where all network, storage and server resources are combined for application use – that VMware hopes to have users build.

A large number of other announcements were made at VMworld. Among them was LeftHand Networks’ new version of SAN/iQ 8, which includes SmartClone technology and a performance and connection manager. SAN/IQ SmartClone ensures that duplicate data is not cloned to storage, thus improving utilization. The Performance Manager manages, monitors and tunes performance. Lastly, SAN/iQ Virtual Connection Manager is a server-to-volume mapping product that simplifies the linkage of servers, to volumes.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.