FalconStor this week became one of the first storage vendors to announce its support of Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization technology. FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) now supports Hyper-V environments and Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering. FalconStor NSS allows application-consistent failover across geographically dispersed clusters of both physical and Hyper-V enabled virtual servers.

The product works with Windows Server 2008 Multi-Site Clustering to provide customers with disaster recovery. FalconStor's NSS also uses WAN optimization technology to reduce the amount of data being replicated between locations.

Compellent is another company that indirectly supports Hyper-V. One of its customers, Munder Capital Management, chose Hyper-V over VMware, Citrix XenServer and Virtual Iron to virtualize their server environment. The company’s main goal was to provide a disaster recovery implementation using Compellent’s Storage Center SAN array.

Mike Dufek, director of IT at Munder Capital, chose Hyper-V for its performance, ease of use and management, integration with the existing ecosystem and its comparable value. In doing so, Dufek has saved between $800 and $1,000 per month on power and cooling costs, reduced the number of physical servers from 42 to six and reduced the amount of time it takes to provision and failover a server from 4 to 6 hours to just minutes.

Dufek boots his servers from the Compellent SAN.

“We have multiple sites so if we lose disks at a site, we can bring the backup from images stored on the SAN,” says Dufek. “And there is replay. You can use and recover snapshots and design your workflow around those snapshots in the same way for both physical and virtual servers.”

Many storage companies have not yet announced compatibility with Hyper-V, like they have done for VMware. They say they are waiting for their customers to adopt Hyper-V before rolling out any product plans to support it.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.