EMC announced new software features for the EMC Rainfinity Global File Virtualization platform that improve the management of information in heterogeneous network attached storage (NAS) environments.

The new release of EMC Rainfinity Global File Virtualization includes two significant new capabilities, Global Namespace Management and Synchronous IP (internet protocol) Replication, which provide customers with greatly improved management and protection capabilities for all of their file-based information throughout its lifecycle.

The EMC Rainfinity Global File Virtualization technology provides heterogeneous NAS and file server virtualization to achieve increased networked storage utilization, optimized performance, accelerated storage consolidations and flexible data protection. The Rainfinity platform is the latest addition to EMC's industry-leading storage and server virtualization technologies, which also include the company's SAN (storage area network)-based EMC Invista virtualization platform and the server virtualization capabilities provided by VMware.

"When you look at all the virtualization stories out there, the EMC story is by far the most complete," said Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "EMC covers every important element of the infrastructure including servers with VMware, block storage with Invista, and file virtualization with EMC Rainfinity. Eventually, having the entire picture will be a cost of entry. The promise of infrastructure virtualization for IT is to have all of the infrastructure abstracted from the application layer to create simple to manage, easy to deploy, easy to scale solutions. Rainfinity really completes the picture."

The new Rainfinity Global Namespace Management capability provides a unified view of the files and file systems that are located on any number of heterogeneous file servers and NAS devices on the IP network. The Global Namespace capability also centralizes the management of industry-standard Windows and UNIX namespace services across distributed environments. The Rainfinity Synchronous IP Replication capabilities provide increased protection for critical files and file systems via synchronous replication over the IP network. Additional features include granular administrator control of replication below storage device and disk volume levels, as well as the support of multi-vendor storage environments and heterogeneous deployments.

Virtualization has rapidly become a critical enabling technology for NAS. According to a survey conducted by Coughlin Associates, NAS virtualization deployments are projected to double in 2006. EMC NAS virtualization solutions are being deployed by customers in major industries including automotive, biotech, education, healthcare, manufacturing, technology and financial services. These customers include four of the top five U.S. financial institutions.

"Given its importance to information lifecycle management, file system virtualization is a key area of focus at EMC," said Howard Elias, EMC Executive Vice President, Marketing and Office of Technology. "The new capabilities of the Rainfinity Global File Virtualization platform will help eliminate several major customer pain points as the number of NAS servers customers must manage continue to grow. Through this innovative and unique technology, we are able to help customers migrate data from one system to another without disruption, effectively balance their capacity loads, optimize performance and ensure that data is stored in the most cost-effective way as its value changes over its lifetime."

The Rainfinity platform also includes powerful capacity management, performance management and tiered storage management applications that lower the total cost of storage ownership by optimizing the entire multi-vendor NAS environment. The capacity management function locates and resolves any capacity issues and performs capacity load balancing to optimize storage utilization. Similarly, the performance management application identifies and addresses performance issues and eliminates bottlenecks and hotspots. The tiered storage management takes advantage of the Rainfinity migration capability by using frequency-of-access data to identify unstructured data for relocation to lower-cost, near-line storage, maximizing an organization's investment in tier-one storage hardware.