IT organizations are facing ongoing challenges with storage: as applications multiply and infrastructure grows at the core data center and the edge, both the cost and management complexity grow in tandem. Many organizations rate data growth as their top concern, while capital expenses and operational expenses are also near the top. We believe concerns around growth and cost are highly correlated.
Broadcom has been hard at work to build an enterprise-grade storage solution within VMware Cloud Foundation that can alleviate these challenges: VMware vSAN.
VMware vSAN is VMware’s hyperconverged storage solution, built from the ground up to provide best-in-class storage to VMware vSphere VMs and containerized applications. VMware vSAN aggregates local disks across multiple hosts into a shared datastore and provides enterprise-class data services via software.
Broadcom partnered with IDC, a leading analyst firm, to interview VMware vSAN users to measure the financial and operational benefits of adopting VMware vSAN. IDC conducted in-depth interviews of vSAN customers and assessed the benefits of vSAN adoption from multiple angles. Below are some of the highlights:
VMware vSAN lowers storage capital expenditures
VMware vSAN offers significant storage-related cost savings for organizations by increasing their virtualization levels, which reduces physical storage hardware and resource requirements. Enhanced virtualization helps organizations allocate storage resources more efficiently to meet demand without over-provisioning.
Here’s a customer quote supporting this observation:
“The driving force for selecting VMware vSAN was that we didn’t want to keep investing in hardware and servers. We’re in retail and not an IT business. We try to take advantage of VMware vSAN to optimize the hardware we had in place and to minimize buying hardware.”
VMware vSAN Simplifies Storage to Increase IT Efficiency
VMware vSAN enables staff efficiencies in managing and supporting storage environments by providing simplified environments, integration, and automation. Storage infrastructure teams benefit from streamlined processes that simplify storage asset management. Simplification enables IT storage teams to respond more quickly to change requests, new systems, and challenges, reducing hardware procurement cycles and the time to deploy and set up storage environments.
Here’s a customer quote supporting this observation:
“VMware vSAN has simplified our IT storage team’s response to change requests, new systems, and challenges. Previously, hardware procurement and setup took a long time, but now it’s done in days. This increases our efficiency by 35%–40%.”
VMware vSAN Enhances Storage Reliability and Performance
VMware vSAN’s distributed architecture also provides greater resiliency and security, with most interviewed organizations reporting no or minimal impactful outages. This enhances the overall performance and reliability of their storage environments and facilitates business continuity.
Here’s a customer quote supporting this observation:
“Based on our internal SLAs, improvement with VMware vSAN reduces downtime from several days a year to just a few hours.”
Next Steps
VMware vSAN can deliver significant cost and operational efficiencies versus traditional three-tier systems that it replaces. It reduces both capital and operational costs while also enhancing reliability and performance as compared to the storage systems it replaces.
You can read the full report on the VMware vSAN website.
*Source: Marden, Matthew and Carol Sliwa. The Business Value of VMware vSAN Storage for Hyperconverged Infrastructure. IDC, November 2024. IDC#US52705024
