Arraya Insights | May 10, 2023
As the modern economy is driving IT complexity, VMware’s vSAN has become a foundational element of both private and public clouds. vSAN is a software defined storage technology that was created to help organizations bring the benefits of the cloud to their existing on-premises infrastructure without disrupting their workloads or hosts.
As distributed IT demands more flexible resources, this hyperconverged infrastructure reduces complexity by providing a single storage control plane for all applications. Further, vSAN is the only storage software that is fully integrated with VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation.
In the hybrid-cloud era, businesses must build an efficient and simple data center to remove hardware dependencies, decrease TCO, and increase agility.
In this blog, we’ll explore the use cases for vSAN, the many benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure, and what’s new with vSAN 8, Update 1.
A Crash Course in vSAN
vSAN provides customers with industry leading deployment flexibility and integrated services with leading cloud environments. vSAN supports the most hybrid cloud use cases and provides enterprise-grade, general-purpose infrastructure for VM and container-based applications.
With vSAN, users can:
- Scale up and out without compromise: vSAN easily scales up by adding drives, and out by adding hosts. vSAN offers an agile, cost-effective cluster design.
- Optimize platform performance: Users can expect a 70% performance uplift for critical product experience management applications and up to 64% in CapEx savings.
- Enhance operations: Users can reduce time spent on routine tasks by more than 50% with simplified processes performed by a unified infrastructure team. Align storage policies with workloads (not with storage hardware constructs), enable faster delivery of services with reduced staff overhead, and experience a faster learning curve with a familiar management solution (vCenter).
- Accelerate cloud native storage: Dynamically provision and scale persistent volumes for Kubernetes-based applications via cloud native storage and gain integration with a growing list of third-party cloud native applications. Resilience and placement of data is defined by a storage policy that can be applied to a single VM, many VMs, or a single VMDK.
The Benefits in Numbers:
As the foundational platform for traditional applications, cloud native applications, and hybrid cloud, HCI eliminates IT silos and makes infrastructure future ready. VMware vSAN primes businesses for growth through a seamless evolution because it’s integrated with the market-leading hypervisor, vSphere.
This HCI solution can result in:
- 73% reduction in opex
- 259% ROI
- 51% less time for common storage tasks
This is why HCI powered by vSAN is consistently named as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software.
What’s New in vSAN?
Today, vSAN 8, Update 1 is here with more flexibility, power, and applications. Users can expect new features and capabilities, including:
- Unbound scaling: Previous users were limited to scaling up to 64 nodes in a cluster, up to 100 file shares per cluster, and up to 20 nodes per site in a stretched cluster. With the latest update, users can take advantage of unbound scaling through VMware HCI Mesh.
- Optimized platform for high performance: As the next level of vSAN Express Storage Architecture, the latest update is tuned to support a greater breadth of workloads on next-gen devices and offers up to 25% higher throughput for sequential write workloads, better performance on applications, and improved data durability.
- Enhanced operations: Storage management has been simplified with dynamic defaults, users have access to granular insights of live performance metrics, the IO trip analyzer has improved functionality and automation, and troubleshooting is simplified with a Cluster Health Score.
- Accelerated cloud native storage: Users can expect seamless, accelerated storage consumption, enhanced performance efficiency, and improved resilience for cloud native apps.
Next Steps: Start Your Hybrid Cloud Journey on the Right Foot
Let us work with you to architect, deploy, and support a hybrid cloud that will drive your business today while providing agility to give you a competitive advantage well into the future.
With Arraya, we:
- Offer unrivaled expertise with VMware, as one of their first partners in our region
- Don’t just re-sell products, we act as a strategic advisor and will support our customers’ broader technology needs
- Go above and beyond to make sure customers see every engagement as a positive experience
- Provide on-going support through our managed services to ensure long-term ROI goals are met
Contact one of our HCI experts today to schedule a consultation to learn more about how vSAN can impact your organization.
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