Powering Your Business-Critical Applications with VMware vSAN

When disruptive technology meets well-established paradigms, it takes time for everyone to "get the grade." Many companies are simply conservative and do not like change, while others believe that adopting version "1.0" is a problem. (It's hard to argue with the latter!) Very seldom do you find a mature and innovative product at the same time and VMware vSAN, in my opinion, is part of the exclusive list.

Earlier this week, CRN named vSAN 6.6 winner of the 2017 Product of the Year Awards in the Software Defined Storage category, Technology subcategory. Recent market studies from IDC and 451 Research show how important the basic HCI software is to the rapidly growing HCI market, and that VMware vSAN leads the market (Read more in this blog). Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there are still people wondering if VMware vSAN is ready to handle their level 1 workloads: the business-critical applications that the organization depends on (and the continuous use of staff of you). For those recalcitrant, let's see the facts:

Most customers rely on vSAN to run their critical business applications: at the time of writing this blog, vSAN has more than 10,000 customers, and in a recent survey, more than 60% of respondents told us they are using vSAN to support critical applications for the business including Oracle, SQL, Exchange and SAP. VMware has helped make those implementations easy by developing reference architectures for all those applications. There is no greater safety security than knowing that others have taken a successful step.

Innovation rate: next, let's look at the software development. The vSAN team has released seven major releases in the last three years; the product is now in version 6.6.1, not 1.0. Each of those seven releases and innumerable patches in the middle further enhanced the reliability of the solutions and the additional support for a wide range of enterprise-class features that make hyperconverged solutions (HCI) powered by vSAN an ideal platform for critical workloads

•     Space efficiency functions such as; De-duplication, compression and erasure online. Test results show up to 50% higher performance for all-flash systems that use data services compared to vSAN 6.5
•     Ability to protect data with the first native HCI security defined by industry software with data encryption at rest
•     Site protection for 50% less than traditional solutions with improved extended clusters (Get more information about size and capacity considerations in this blog)
•     Up to 2.5 times more performance with scalable Intel Xeon processors, Intel Optane SSD and VMware vSAN 6.6 compared to previous server architectures and vSAN editions.

Solutions certified with vSAN ReadyLabs: this team within VMware works with all our OEM partners to ensure that server platforms and their components are fully tested and certified for our customers. We now have 15 OEM server partners with server platforms that are certified to run vSAN so you can choose the provider and the security that things will work correctly when turned on. And if you want to make it even simpler, we have partnered with Dell EMC to deliver the complete VxRail HCI device; just connect it and it will be practically in operation. (Get more information about vSAN ReadyNodes)

Automatic health checks with Cloud Analytics: In addition, vSAN 6.6 introduced Cloud Analytics. This service performs status checks on your vSAN installation and proactively alerts you of possible problems and gives you suggestions on how to proceed. The cloud-based architecture can be updated in real time as new recommendations are created and passed to the client immediately without requiring customer intervention or vSAN updates.

The hyperconverged infrastructure is an element of change in the data center, but requires significant advances in technology. Trying to balance the flexibility of the hardware with the simplicity of the implementation is always a challenge. VMware built its reputation on reliability, and business customers rely on VMware vSAN with its most important assets: data. vSAN supports critical business applications for thousands of organizations, and every day they enter more online.

CenturyLink: "We can deliver more than 6 million IOPS with our fully flash clusters and optimize consistent performance levels, which leads to fewer support calls and happier customers, data is always available, and we do not need to increase our prices to compensate big capital expenditures. " - Jeremyah Corner, Director of Software Development, Centurylink Cloud

Special benefits of ACI: "With vSAN, we are using configurations of all the flashes to get a 35% increase in performance while reducing costs," says Fay. "We tried another hyperconverged solution, but we preferred vSAN because of its cost-effective scalability and native integration with vSphere.", Ryan Fay, CIO Global, ACI Specialty Benefits

Union Hospital: "In fact, we had clinics calling us to say how much faster the applications were running once they were in a pure vSAN environment.It seems that the more things we migrate to vSAN, the more people are begging to be in it." - Chad Elliott, Network Systems Consultant, Union Hospital

Fulton County Schools: "What used to take our users from 30 to 45 minutes to meet in the old environment, now takes less than 5 minutes, that frees up valuable time for our teachers that they can use to help students" , Kenny Wilder, Director of Network Infrastructure, Fulton County Schools.

Baystate Health: "Based on the uptime requirements, the integration of all the different silos and essentially the fluidity of the architecture, VMware is, as far as we are concerned, the right choice, practically the most robust approach to hyperconvergence "Mike Feld Interim CTO, Baystate Health

As you can see above, vSAN is a great success for our customers, and we will continue to make the necessary investments to be the highest quality HCI option in the market. Lee Caswell, VP of Products, Storage and Availability Business Unit at VMware, predicts big changes in Servers and Storage in 2018.