I just came back from VMworld. The conference has changed and I believe the world has changed. For everything from provisioning servers and clients to effective resource management, virtual environments are here to stay. The most amazing thing was that the expo at the conference could have almost been a virtual storage expo.

When I talked to customers, it became very clear that storage virtualization was high on their minds. Vendors understood this and showed up in droves. Everyone from primary storage to data protection applications and appliances to data management and monitoring services were showing their wares at the show.

With Quantum’s acquisition of Pancetera, we had great interest in our booth and our solutions. We are now able to provide you with a full end-to-end solution. From the moment you create your data on a client or server, our products are there to help you protect your data.

We have begun to integrate Pancetera products with existing Quantum products with the announcement of the vmPRO 4000. Pancetera already has helped their remote office and point of sale customers protect data with distributed features like centralized management and easy deployment without buying and deploying costly backup applications.

The vmPRO 4000 enhances that offering by providing local deduplicated storage and deduplicated replication back to a central data center. This will reduce local storage size for recent data and, more importantly, reduce network bandwidth by as much as 90% for replication.

This product brings us back to the basic values Quantum offers you: by integrating technology at the source, we can optimize the movement and storage of data throughout your network and data centers.

And this is only the beginning. You will see us introduce more client software to enable Smart Motion and DXi deduplication in both virtual and software only solutions. You will see us extend our reach and use the same technologies to treat the private or public cloud as an extension of your data center, reaping the same data movement and data storage optimizations.

As always, you will see us continue to be your partner, growing our products to meet your needs and exceed your expectations in this inevitably virtualized world.