August 2, 2010 | Enterprise Storage Forum | By Kevin Komiega
Storage virtualization startup Pancetera is out to optimize I/O for backup, replication, security scanning, and WAN mobility in virtual machine (VM) environments.
The company today unveiled Pancetera Unite, a virtual appliance that makes it possible to integrate standard file system tools, such as backup, replication, and migration software, with a VMware virtual infrastructure.
Pancetera’s Unite virtual appliance resides on a single host and aggregates all VMs into a unified view that can serve as a mount point for backup and restore applications.
Unite looks and behaves like a NAS product. Bart Bartlett, Pancetera’s vice president of marketing, said the Unite file system can be mounted as a CIFS share or NFS mount, and supports all standard operations, such as copying files, as you would with any other file system.
// The difference, however, is that data is not written to the Pancetera Unite file system. Instead, the file system is populated with the VM files from vSphere ESX or ESXi servers. Hosts and VMs appear in browseable directories, regardless of back-end storage type.