EMC upgrades Invista for NAS virtualization

EMC, the owner of virtualization software company VMware, has launched the latest version of its Invista virtualization product for networked storage.

Invista version 2.0, launched on Monday, will be certified for use with VMware software later this month, according to EMC. It is the company's first virtualization product for use with network-attached storage (NAS) systems, as well as storage area networks (SANs).

According to Colin Bailey, a director of EMC's software group, other companies cannot offer similar flexibility of storage with virtualization. "Invista can work from virtual to virtual, physical to virtual and virtual to physical," Bailey said. "That is unique and a feature of the RecoverPoint technology which we launched last year."

According to Bailey, Invista has now been tested and certified for use with VMware's ESX Server and this will allow customers to "better manage, share and protect their growing storage".

New features in Invista 2.0 include, according to EMC, an extension to the distance allowed between nodes on a cluster, which can now be up to 300 meters apart.

"Unlike other virtualization solutions, this capability allows Invista to continue operating in the event of localized failures", EMC said in a statement.

The company has also expanded Invista's scalability features and doubled the number of virtual storage volumes. EMC said that it now offers a fivefold increase in the number of simultaneous mobility sessions compared with the first version of the product.

Another development in the product concerns load balancing. The product previously offered front-end load balancing but, in version 2, it has had the feature added at the back end as well.

Bailey said that the price of Invista varies, but a typical system with 10TB (terabytes) of storage would cost around US$100,000 (£49,000).