By Ben Siler, EUC Product Marketing
Business mobility helps your people perform better. When employees have the ability to access their applications anytime, anywhere, and on any device, they’re happier and more productive. Business mobility means more than just remote access to email and a few SaaS apps, however; organizations need to provide a complete virtual workspace that’s as good as physical.
Workspace transformation with virtual desktops and apps offers your employees the access they need, but storage for virtual desktops and apps can pose challenges to your datacenter.
Desktop and app virtualization projects often run into issues when they come up against I/O hungry OSes and apps that were designed to take advantage of low-latency attached storage assigned 1:1 to users. Now, that storage and IO capacity is stretched across network and hundreds or thousands of users. Although some IT departments turn to high-cost specialty storage arrays to address this performance gap, Virtual SAN provides a lower-cost solution, with great performance and scalability for mission critical workloads like VDI.
With VMware Virtual SAN with Horizon, you solve the problems of cost and complexity with the radically simple storage, scalable performance, and pay-as-you-grow affordability you need to bring transformative business mobility to your workforce.
Virtual SAN delivers a supercharged, yet simplified solution leveraging industry-standard flash, disks, and x86 servers to create a flash-accelerated distributed datastore. Virtual SAN combines and abstracts these affordable components, giving you software-defined storage that self-tunes and balances based on virtual desktop and app demand. Because the datastore has the flexibility of software, each virtual desktop or app VM has the right storage policies attached from the minute it’s created. Virtual SAN intelligently caches read/write traffic to improve IOPS to give your users the high-performance, just-like-physical experience they expect. Hybrid, flash-and-disk deployments provide a compelling mix of price and performance with up to 40,000 IOPS per host. All-flash deployments provide up to 90,000 IOPS and submillisecond latency.
Virtual SAN creates a distributed datastore
Virtual SAN also helps you avoid overprovisioning IOPS by making it easy to add just the storage you need. With specialized storage arrays, a small increase in demand may push you over your current capacity, requiring an entire forklift upgrade and new array. The extra capacity in the new array goes unused, wasting capital you could have spent on other projects. With Virtual SAN, however, you can add exactly the right amount of storage with just-in-time adjustments that keep you agile. If you need to scale up performance, add flash. If you need to scale up capacity, add disk. If you need to scale out to meet a large new demand, add new hosts.
Virtual SAN is simple, but powerful. It’s embedded in vSphere; you can activate it with just a few clicks. Once it’s running, you don’t have to worry about learning new, proprietary storage interfaces. Virtual SAN uses the vSphere management tools you already know.
Virtual SAN for Horizon provides radically simple storage, superior performance that scales and pay-as-you grow affordability for your virtual desktops and apps. To learn more about what Virtual SAN for Horizon can do for your business, see the overview video.
