The adoption of VMware’s HCI solution accelerates: well over 10,000 organizations choose vSAN to power their IT infrastructure
Guest blog by Nick Cross, Director of HCI, VMware EMEA
Hyper-converged infrastructure has become an extremely popular alternative to traditional legacy external storage and it’s easy to see why. Organisations want more flexible, open, cloud-ready environments. They want to modernise infrastructure without risk, while reducing the cost of ownership. On the other hand IT leaders see HCI as a way to solve many challenges. From meeting increasingly diverse business demands in the face of dwindling budgets to managing sprawling resources that include expensive, complicated and inflexible legacy infrastructure in a hybrid cloud world. To adopt a truly agile hybrid cloud strategy, organisations need to plan a seamless path towards the softwaredefined datacenter (SDDC). And – consequently – ensure connection to a strong public cloud ecosystem.
This is where HCI powered by VMware vSAN comes in. As the HCI market continues to evolve and accelerate, only VMware offers an integrated HCI stack that delivers that all-important route to the SDDC and greater IT agility; the essential digital foundation for the hybrid cloud.
Leadership: in private, public and hybrid
You must get two main elements right in your journey to a hybrid cloud. First of all you need a strong private (on-prem) cloud adoption and ecosystem. Secondly, you need a broad public cloud ecosystem that offers HCI-as-a-service. VMware vSAN already has the HCI industry’s largest hybrid cloud ecosystem. We have more than 10,000 private clouds running on over 500 Ready Nodes from 15 distinct server OEM partners.
At the same time, a strong public cloud ecosystem is essential when you’re planning the most effective digital foundation. It has the ability to bring your enterprise continuous flexibility, agility and choice. More than 250 public cloud providers already depend on vSAN to power their products and services. Like flagship offerings from the US telecoms and data services provider CenturyLink. “CenturyLink has multiple cloud products providing world-class solutions to our customers built on the power of VMware VSAN, a fundamental piece of the complete SDDC” explains Steven Nolen, CenturyLink’s Senior Lead Product Manager – Private Cloud.
“VMware vSAN has scaled flawlessly to over more than 11 petabytes of production data on high-performance all-flash devices that provide a consistent application experience for the most demanding workloads, from business-critical applications to cloud-native applications. The rapid innovation in vSAN will further help us deliver a robust platform. With enterprise-class resiliency and intelligent, self-healing capabilities to enable our customers to rely on a high performance hyper-converged infrastructure.”
Delivering a new HCI Experience
Given this genuine innovation, it is maybe not surprising that VMware emerged this year as a clear leader in Gartner, Inc’s inaugural Magic Quadrant for HCI; the first software-only vendor in the leader quadrant in an area where software has become the differentiating factor.
At the same time, IDC data (Q4 2017) has confirmed that vSAN is the largest HCI vendor by revenue, well outpacing its nearest competitors. In figures: 32.4% market share, and by overall market growth with 111% year-over-year growth. VMware vSAN resonates with our customer because it delivers precisely what it promises. With a credible roadmap for continued future growth and innovation.
Enterprises are choosing VMware HCI powered by vSAN, in ever-increasing numbers. Because they need an approach that is agile, scalable and cost-efficient to support rapid business growth. And the story continues: this week sees the launch of our seventh generation vSAN version 6.7. For this version, we gathered feedback from customers, with lessons that we learned telling us the areas to focus on.
Adding new value
As a result, vSAN is bringing measurable new value in three key areas:
- First: Simplified operations and ease of use
- Secondly: Application consistency and security
- Thirdly: Ensuring holistic and proactive approach to customer support
In practice, this means an extremely intuitive management experience that includes global infrastructure visibility, streamlined operational tasks and reduced time-to-expertise.
It means delivering a consistent and secure application experience to provide predictable performance, resilience and availability. This also includes intelligent self-healing capabilities, enhanced site protection, automated and accelerated recovery, and government-validated security.
It also means launching vSAN ReadyCare, our new end-to-end customer support experience that encompasses the best people, analytics and technology. Ultimately, that’s what it’s all about: delivering a great customer experience.
Want to know more?
- Now is the ideal time to “Hit Refresh” on your data center infrastructure: purchase our industry-leading HCI solution and take advantage of a 20% price promotion
- Visit our What’s New in vSAN 6.7 resource site
