As organizations worldwide strive to transform their infrastructure to keep up with the demands of the digital era, hyperconverged storage has emerged as a key enabler for IT modernization. VMware vSAN is at the forefront of this revolution, offering a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution to manage critical workloads.
However, once IT has decided to adopt a new technology such as hyperconverged storage, finding the right starting point can be a challenge. Certain points in time might be clear, such as an infrastructure refresh or a new IT deployment at an edge location. When it comes to workloads though, the adoption curve – which workloads to start with and how to progress – can be a bit of a mystery.
VMware recently commissioned a paper with the Enterprise Strategy Group to look into the role of hyperconvergd storage, its benefits, and the pivotal use cases where it is making a significant impact. The recommendations are based on surveys of hundreds hyperconverged storage users as well as thousands of real-world deployments.
Why Storage is a Challenge
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, managing storage is a daunting task. Data volumes are growing exponentially due to factors like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and cloud-native applications. Storage complexity and fragmentation are also on the rise, with data scattered across on-premises, cloud, and edge locations. Traditional storage architectures, based on three-tier systems, have become costly, difficult to scale, and require specialized skills. This has created a pressing need for a new approach that simplifies storage while meeting the growing demands of modern applications.
Enter Hyperconverged Storage
VMware vSAN addresses the limitations of traditional storage with a hyperconverged approach, which aggregates storage resources from multiple servers into a shared datastore. This simplifies management, enhances performance, and provides incremental scalability. Unlike traditional storage, which is rigid and expensive, hyperconverged storage offers a flexible model that allows organizations to scale up or down as needed and runs on industry-standard servers, lowering capital expenditures. Hyperconverged storage enables organizations to have common software-based infrastructure a common operational model across the core data center, edge and public cloud, greatly simplifying management at scale. VMware has an extensive hardware compatibility list that has certified vSAN to run on systems focused on the edge as well as the core data center.
Additionally, vSAN accelerates routine storage operations, such as provisioning storage in minutes instead of hours or days, making it an ideal solution for fast-paced environments. The tight integration with VMware’s cloud infrastructure allows for seamless management of both virtual machines and containers, making it a versatile solution for private and hybrid cloud environments.
Key Workloads for Hyperconverged Storage
VMware vSAN shines in a variety of use cases, demonstrating its flexibility and scalability:
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): With more enterprises moving to virtual desktops for remote workers, remote office workers, or save on PC support, VDI is more critical than ever. However, VDI requires high performance, linear scaling and data reduction technologies to optimize storage costs. vSAN addresses this by offering a scale-out solution; vSAN’s latest storage architecture delivers high performance through support for the latest storage devices, NVMe-based TLC. Finally, vSAN offers a variety of data reduction technologies to keep storage requirements to a minimum.
- Business-critical Applications: For demanding database applications like Oracle, SQL Server, and SAP HANA, vSAN provides high performance and scalability. vSAN Express Storage Architecture delivers high-performance and resiliency consistently, even with RAID 5/6 erasure coding for efficiency. vSAN also enables independent scaling of storage and compute resources with vSAN storage clusters, enabling IT to scale like OTLP workloads, which typically grow storage requirements much faster than compute. Customers may also optimize their license costs via disaggregation.
- “Mainstream” Workloads: Web Servers, Disaster Recovery and Data Protection: This group of applications are well understood and mature, workhorse applications that in many cases need “it just works,” lost cost storage with ease of management. vSAN simplifies storage management for these workloads with policy-based management, and it lowers costs by using industry-standard servers to deliver the required performance. vSAN simplifies disaster recovery by allowing organizations to replicate data across sites without the need for expensive, specialized hardware. By virtualizing the storage, IT can place just the storage they need for their most critical applications at a DR site; IT can reduce the upfront investment required. vSAN can provide stretch clustering for the most sensitive applications and a lower cost DR site with asynchronous replication for less critical workloads. This enables more flexible and cost-effective disaster recovery solutions, even for smaller IT teams.
- Workloads at the Edge: Hyperconverged storage solutions offer a path forward by providing scalability, flexibility, and enhanced performance at the edge at a lower cost, in a smaller footprint, and, crucially, in a simplified form factor. Key capabilities for VMware vSAN include:
- the ability to scale cost-effectively
- support for native file and block storage to reduce physical footprint
- high performance via support for NVMe-based TLC NAND flash for latency sensitive applications
- centralized management that enables management of all remote sites from a single tool
- Cloud-native support that enables both containers and VMs to be managed with a single, general-purpose infrastructure
- Cloud–Native Workloads: Hyperconverged storage solutions are, again, an ideal approach, as they can offer cloud-native storage support to automate storage provisioning for container-based workloads. This enables developers to get the storage they need, when they need it, while at the same time enabling IT admins to run, monitor, and manage storage for both containers and virtual machines on the same platform.
Conclusion: The Future of Storage is Here
VMware vSAN is more than just a storage solution—it’s a cornerstone of IT modernization. By leveraging the power of virtualization, vSAN enables organizations to create a flexible, scalable, and efficient storage infrastructure that can handle the demands of both today’s and tomorrow’s workloads. Whether you’re looking to streamline your VDI, optimize your database performance, or modernize your disaster recovery strategy, VMware vSAN provides a comprehensive solution to meet your needs.
Ready to modernize your storage infrastructure? Read the full report by ESG and then visit VMware’s vSAN page to learn more about how vSAN can help your organization achieve unparalleled scalability, flexibility, and performance.
