Many IT organizations want to move to a more cloud-like operational model in their data center, which can provide a host of benefits, from improved performance, enhanced resiliency and efficiency and simplified operations. A key part of any transformation initiative is the storage component of the infrastructure.
VMware’s leading private cloud platform, VMware Cloud Foundation, delivers a cloud operating model at scale, accelerates developer innovation and hardens infrastructure with enterprise-grade resiliency. VMware vSAN is the storage component of VMware Cloud Foundation; its is a software-based storage solution built from the ground up to support VMware vSphere virtual machines as well as Kubernetes-orchestrated containers and delivers the performance, scale and resiliency customers require for a modern storage system.
Many customers have challenges with their existing storage solution: VMware customers routinely cite storage performance, scalability and cost as their top concerns. When opting to move to VMware Cloud Foundation and build a private cloud, customers receive entitlement to VMware vSAN and must deploy it with the management domain and can use it for their workload domains.
Adopting vSAN with VMware Cloud Foundation can provide significant cost benefits over an existing storage solution. In a recently published study, Signal65 (formerly Evaluator Group) found that VMware vSAN can deliver the following financial benefits:
Three Key Drivers of Savings
Signal65’s paper takes a comprehensive look at the cost of procuring and managing a storage system over five years, starting with hardware costs and support costs, software licensing for VCF, vSAN licensing requirements, and administrative costs. Costs that were determined to be roughly similar in both setups were excluded from the paper. Signal65 determined there were three key areas where VMware vSAN drove significant savings: hardware costs, hardware support costs and administrative costs.
Hardware Costs
The VMware vSAN solution reduced the amount of hardware required over the traditional storage solution, and its ability to scale up by adding additional drives to nodes before scaling out to more nodes were the main drivers of cost reduction. By deploying in a vSAN Max configuration, vSAN was able to take advantage of increased storage density (up to 300 TB per node) to reduce the number of nodes required. VMware vSAN also uses industry-standard servers, which helps lower the cost of the solution.
Hardware Support Costs
Hardware support costs are a major driver of the cost of a storage solution. By leveraging industry-standard servers to build a storage-only cluster in a disaggregated topology, VMware vSAN’s hardware support costs were over $1M less in year one than the traditional storage solution.
Administrative Costs
Key to any cloud-like operational model is simplicity and speed of operations. VMware vSAN is able to dramatically reduce the time spent deploying by 76%, managing and maintaining storage. Rather than multiple admins managing compute and storage systems separately, VMware vSAN allows the VM admin to handle both compute and storage. Simplified workflows that leverage a high degree of automation reduce the time spent on provisioning storage. Integration with vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation simplify and automate lifecycle management. VMware vSAN also includes features such as vSAN Health, I/O Trip Analyzer and integrates with VMware Cloud Foundation Operations to simplify troubleshooting and remediation.
Next Steps
To view the complete report and better understand how VMware vSAN can lower storage costs during your private cloud transformation, read the complete report on Signal65’s website.
Source: Lewis, Mitch. The Economics of Disaggregated Private Cloud Storage. Signal65. July 2024. https://signal65.com/research/the-economics-of-disaggregated-private-cloud-storage/
