In April Wikibon.org surveyed its members concerning their choices and experience in virtualizing storage resources on the popular VMware hypervisor. Since then, Wikibon CTO David Floyer has published a series of informative articles on the www.wikibon.org site analyzing the results for information that can help CIOs considering the virtualization of their data center resources.

In this latest article, EMC and NetApp Lead in VMware Storage Integration Functionality, Floyer looks at why a large majority of respondents chose EMC and NetApp as the best choices of hardware for virtualization on VMware. The answer, he found, is that these platforms provide the greatest functionality under VMware of the seven vendor product families included in the survey, with HP, 3Par, and Hitachi AMS close behind. The two trailing systems are from IBM and Dell.

Floyer breaks down the specific functions the platforms support under virtualization in detail and goes further to examine the quality of implementation of each function on each platform and the importance of that function in the market in general.

It is no surprise that EMC leads in this rating, given that it owns VMware, and while the virtualization company operates as a separate business entity, the channels between it and EMC are obviously very strong. The value of this piece is in the details. CIOs and CTOs planning virtualization projects for their companies can use the lists to plan allocation of different storage resources to virtualized and unvirtualized environments and to avoid surprises.

Floyer is very clear that this article is in no way a full analysis of the relative merits of the platforms or is meant to provide an endorsement of any technology. Nor does it attempt to predict what functions any of the platforms will support under VMware, or any other hyprvisor, in the future. It reflects answers provided by a large number of Wikibon.org members, most of them users, and the situation as they find it today.