Partner Spotlight: VMware

Organizations are taking advantage of virtualized servers and storage to run myriad back-office applications such as email, customer databases, manufacturing system and other highly I/O driven data transfers. Three out of four businesses depend on virtualization technology, with the vast majority of these (over 70%) using VMware ESXi™ as their primary hypervisor. These businesses depend on the reliability, performance and manageability of their VMware software and hardware ecosystem.

VMware ESXi is the world’s leading hypervisor. The prime benefits of implementing a VMware environment are the flexibility, scalability and agility of virtual ecosystems. The speed of provisioning and the ease of management add to the benefits for those architecting hybrid cloud, remote workgroup and disaster recovery solutions.

For well over a decade ATTO has been optimizing storage networking and connectivity products for VMware environments. ATTO partners with VMware through their Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) VMware Ready™ program. VMware Ready is the highest level of endorsement, making it easy to identify products optimized for VMware.

Over the past few years, ATTO has introduced two significant innovations to the VMware ecology. The first is a method for virtualizing an Apple Mac Pro® or Mac mini® using ATTO ThunderLink® Thunderbolt™ adapters and ATTO VMware Ready certified ESXi drivers. ATTO ThunderLink adapters are the only purpose-built Thunderbolt product designed to connect virtualized Macs to Fibre Channel storage solutions within VMware VSphere® environments. This is a trailblazing, efficient solution for Apple application development and testing, virtual desktop infrastructure and cloud environments.

The second innovation is a way of expanding storage options for vSAN™ by disaggregating storage with ATTO XstreamCORE® intelligent bridges. A white paper on this topic is available on our VMware Solution Guide page.

ATTO XstreamCORE intelligent bridges are particularly useful in VMware environments, presenting SAS storage on iSCSI or Fibre Channel networks allowing blade servers to connect to highly efficient block storage. XstreamCORE can easily add a SAN to any architecture, dramatically speeding up virtual machine migrations, allowing for hardware-accelerated remote backups, and easy storage management among many other functions. Complete information is available in the ATTO VMware Application Guide.

Indeed, the range of ATTO products certified with VMware ESXi covers many use cases. From diagnostics and configuration management with vConfigTool™, Fibre Channel and SAS/SATA HBAs optimized for virtual environments, to Thunderbolt connectivity with ATTO ThunderLink adapters and SAN creation and management with ATTO XstreamCORE intelligent bridges.

The scale and scope of VMware and their impact on the IT industry is immense. ATTO is proud of our long-term partnership with VMware and the unique, high-performance solutions we provide for VMware ecosystems. Virtualized architectures continue to evolve and we look forward to contributing further to the future of computing alongside VMware.