On March 18th, the Virtual SAN team had the pleasure of hosting 12 delegates at the VMware campus for Storage Field Day (SFD) 9. This 2-hour event was live streamed to an audience of more than 280 individuals from 10 countries with United States having the highest representation of 78.6% followed by UK with 6.8%. Believe it or not, we had representation from Czech Republic, Germany and even Morocco!
Yanbing Li, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Storage and Availability provided an overview of Virtual SAN as well as the Hyper-Converged industry trends. Christos Karamanolis, Fellow, Storage and Availability, presented the bulk of the session with a deep dive in Virtual SAN technical capabilities and performance numbers. Finally, Rawlinson Rivera, Principal Architect, Storage and Availability highlighted the simplicity of Virtual SAN and demoed the management and live tracking capabilities of VSAN.
I know for many of you that joined us live, the 2 hours was enlightening and even answered questions that you didn’t even realize you had. We could tell from reactions on Twitter:
If you didn’t get a chance to tune in live, then the replay videos are a must see! Here why we’re so excited about the event:
- There was something for everyone: From the business end of the spectrum, Yanbing’s session emphasized that this is the year for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) going mainstream. Additionally, you will learn about Virtual SAN’s rapid adoption across many use cases w/ Critical Business Production Apps being at the very top. Finally, you’ll learn that Virtual SAN’s business is 75% transactional and 25% ELAs (Enterprise License Agreements). From the technical end of the spectrum, Christos highlighted Virtual SAN as being the cornerstone of VMware’s Hyper-Converged strategy. Additionally, you’ll discover that Virtual SAN is an object based storage system as opposed to a cluster file system. Christos finally provides performance numbers of typical customer workloads that you’ll definitely want to check out. Here’s a listing of all the sessions for your viewing pleasure:
- Virtual SAN is like a rocket ship – literally!: Now in its 4th generation, Virtual SAN 6.2 introduced Deduplication and Compression, RAID 5/6 support, Software Checksum, QoS, Performance Services and Enhanced Capacity Views with its most recent launch. The product has made great strides from its first launch VSAN 5.5 on March 2014. We couldn’t have said it any better than Enrico Signoretti – VMware VSAN, When good enough becomes very good
- Rawlinson’s demo was done in A FLASH: Honestly it proves why we keep emphasizing that Virtual SAN is radically simple! To install, operate, troubleshoot and manage. You can also read Jeff Hunter’s blogs outlining 7 reasons why Virtual SAN is radically simple.
We’d like to extend a huge thank you to all the delegates for being engaging and asking some pretty good questions! And to the entire audience and presenters for making this event successful. We cannot forget to say thank you to the entire Tech Field Day team for being wonderful to work with: Stephen Foskett, Claire Chaplais, Tom Hollingsworth including the video crew Benjamin Freedman and Seth Egert.
We just had to include this little nugget – Tier What!
Additional Resources
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