According to a Gartner survey of midmarket companies, SMBs are adopting virtualization at a very aggressive pace – by 2012, slightly more than 75 percent is expected to have server virtualization in wide use. In the lights of this VMware, a global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, unveiled the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance, a new software product that will bring the rich business continuity and automated resource management capabilities of VMware vSphere to small and midsized businesses (SMBs) without the cost and complexity of shared storage.

The company also announced a comprehensive cloud infrastructure suite, including the release of VMware vSphere 5, a significant update to VMware vSphere. “With vSphere 5 and our cloud infrastructure suite, VMware is helping customers accelerate towards more efficient and automated cloud infrastructure, redefining how resources are managed and secured, and ultimately, driving a more productive relationship between IT and the businesses they serve,” says Paul Maritz, CEO, VMware.

Until now, customers wanting to leverage the rich high availability and automated resource management functionality enabled by VMware vSphere’s resource pooling capabilities needed separate shared storage hardware, which presented a cost and complexity barrier for some SMBs. The new VMware vSphere Storage Appliance will transform server internal storage into shared pools of storage, removing the shared storage hardware requirement and enabling more SMBs to take full advantage of the unique business continuity and automation capabilities of VMware vSphere, including High Availability, vMotion, and Distributed Resource Scheduler. The vSphere Storage Appliance will be very simple to install and configure, eliminating the need for specialized storage skills, thus bringing high application availability to SMBs with just a few mouse clicks.