Revolutionizing Storage in Two Clicks
Cloud Storage is revolutionizing the way we access data from anywhere and at anytime. For those businesses trying to build a large and scalable cloud infrastructure, heavy upfront costs, scaling and deployment issues are routine offenders when it comes to standard storage with a large SAN environment. With this rapid change in how we store our data, it has become necessary to address security, cost, scaling and deployment issues right away.
Cloud Storage is revolutionizing the way we access data from anywhere and at anytime. For those businesses trying to build a large and scalable cloud infrastructure, heavy upfront costs, scaling and deployment issues are routine offenders when it comes to standard storage with a large SAN environment. With this rapid change in how we store our data, it has become necessary to address security, cost, scaling and deployment issues right away.
Imagine running a SAN environment that enables faster go-to-market, cost efficiency, ease of use, and the ability to quickly expand when needed. Now imagine abstracting and pooling physical storage resources on the server to create flexible logical pools of scale-out storage in the virtual data plane.
What used to be a future prediction in cloud storage is finally here. Introducing VMware’s Virtual SAN. VMware Virtual SAN is a new software-defined storage tier for VMware vSphere and is fully integrated with vSphere. Virtual SAN aggregates server disks and flash in a vSphere cluster to create radically simple, high performance, resilient shared storage designed for virtual machines and can be rapidly provisioned from VMware vCenter during virtual machine provisioning operations. Virtual SAN runs directly in the hypervisor and is an example of a hypervisor-converged platform—a solution in which storage and compute for virtual machines are combined into one platform.
Virtual SAN is an object-based storage system designed to provide virtual machine centric storage services and capabilities through a Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) approach. This management architecture enables administrators to specify storage attributes—such as capacity, performance, and availability—in the form of simple policies on a per-VM basis. These policies, governed by service-level agreements (SLAs), dynamically self-tune and load-balance the system so that each virtual machine has the right level of resources.
Virtual SAN is managed through vSphere Web Client and is fully integrated with the VMware stack. Virtual SAN leverages vSphere snapshots, vSphere clones, VMware vSphere Data Protection, and vSphere Replication for data protection, backup, rapid cloning, and disaster-recovery (DR) purposes. Virtual SAN interoperates with vCloud Automation Center and vCenter Operations Management Suite and can be deployed in conjunction with VMware Horizon View in VDI environments and vCenter Site Recovery Manager in DR environments.
Virtual SAN provides both scale-up and scale-out by nondisruptively expanding the capacity of the Virtual SAN data store by adding hosts to a cluster or disks to a host. Storage requirements are associated with individual virtual machines or virtual disks in the form of policy statements. Virtual SAN automatically translates these policy statements into system configurations to instantly provision storage with the right SLAs. Put in simpler terms, the benefits of Virtual SAN include:
- Radically simple storage management
- Self-turning storage and dynamic load balancing
- Two-click storage provisioning
- Interoperability with VMware stack
- High performance with SSD caching
- Resiliency against multiple hardware failures
- Dynamic scaling of performance capacity, both scale-up and scale-out
- Reduced capex via server disks
- High performance, lower TCO
By enabling storage as software running on vSphere, Virtual SAN enables a fundamental new way to provision and manage storage in virtual environments.
To learn more about VMware’s Virtual SAN and how it can change your cloud storage environment, listen to this one-hour webcast replay of the Virtual SAN launch event held on March 6th. During the event our CEO Pat Gelsinger and R&D VP John Gilmartin gave an update on the new product and shared its newest features along with feedback from partners, customers, and industry analysts. We look forward to partnering with you.
Colleen Kapase is senior director of Partner Readiness at VMware. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly, and are part of The VAR Guy’s annual platinum sponsorship.
