Funding Boost for Storage Virtualisation

February 1st 2006: US-based Incipient announces US$24-million additional venture capital funding to increase its total equity to US$79-million for a product that that isn't yet in Beta.

It's official, Storage Virtualisation - a grand concept that, at base, enables interoperability between different storage platforms from a central point - is going to be huge. At least that's what the money seems to be saying. Incipient's eagerly anticipated Network Storage Platform (NSP) should be joining IBM's Virtualisation Engine Suite for Storage and EMC's Invista in the battle for dominance in a much-needed market.

SAN 'islands' - SAN's from different vendors, serving different purposes within the same organisation; in fact SANs from the same vendors in different configurations - currently require vendor-specific management systems in order to manage data.

Incipient's NSP solution, according to the company: "…is embedded in intelligent Fibre Channel (FC) switches and serves as a common software platform that delivers Incipient-developed, network-based storage applications throughout a SAN environment.

"Incipient NSP inserts an abstraction layer between storage and hosts, creating a storage virtualization layer where Incipient NSP-based storage services are implemented. Incipient NSP currently supports or will support intelligent FC switches manufactured by industry leading companies such as Cisco, Brocade, McDATA, QLogic and others."

The problem, despite the funding, is that while IBM and EMC are strongly approaching the market already with well-placed offerings. The hope is that Incipient's product will stay the course rather than becoming 'vapourware' because Storage Virtualisation is certainly strongly favoured over the current, fragmented situation.

Does Storage Virtualisation factor in your plans?

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