There’s been recent talk concerning VMware’s direction moving forward, especially now that VMworld is over and the company’s presented more of its goals around virtualization. That includes logical storage containers in light of an announcement from VMworld 2011.  What VMware is looking to do is getting Logical Units (LUNs) and NFS mount points out of the loop for its customers, with the help of five storage partners.

Traditionally apps request disk or tape storage resources based on LUNs, which refer a logical disk or volume on a SAN that is in turn converted to real physical disks. The apps also use networked file access services via NFS mount points.

VMware plans to eliminate this process, as The Register’s Chris Mellor described in a write-up of Floyer’s analysis.

“According to Floyer, what VMware is proposing is that an app, running in a virtual machine, would address a logical storage container, or VM volume, containing the app’s data, metadata about it, and any policies referring to that data. The storage container would have logical channels, an I/O Demultiplexer, that is connected to the host server’s external storage ports and thence to external arrays.”

An API would allow external arrays to spread a storage container across storage drives, storage tiers, arrays and cache infrastructures in an effort to minimize I/O latency and provide protection against device failures and cost effectiveness, among other things.

The catch is VMware will only be giving API access to  EMC, Dell, Hitachi, IBM and NetApp, a decision that has been criticized as one made to benefit the companies involved, rather than the customers. Floyer went as far as calling this alliance a cartel.

To catch more updates from VMworld 2011, visit SiliconANGLE and theCube.

Over at Citi Technology Conference, VMware  co-president of application platforms Tod Nielsen took on Salesforce, which has been claiming that the private cloud will be gone in 10 years. Nielsen said none of his customers indicated anything to support the trend Salesfroce laid out, and that “[VMware’s] offering is much more compatible with their vision because they can have internal applications that they run themselves.”