Over the past few months I’ve spoken with many customers about Virtual SAN. These conversations usually result in “unofficial” success stories that are published in the form of a blog post. In addition to these informal stories, businesses that successfully implement Virtual SAN are featured in customer case studies. Below are two new customer case studies that highlight how Virtual SAN transformed their IT infrastructure and positioned their business for future growth.
The first study describes how highway infrastructure concessionary Autopista Vespucio Norte (AVN) has leveraged VMware virtualization solutions since 2008 to reduce capital and operational expenditure. vSphere 5.5 and Virtual SAN was them the next step in this process. The complexity of their project was mainly due the fact that as this was an unprecedented technology in the market: since they were literally one of the first to implement Virtual SAN they could not rely on previous experience or proven success cases to validate the VMware VSAN solution. By converging layers of complexity and delivering over 65TB of storage capacity with just IBM 3 hosts all connected using 10GbE Arista switches they managed to reduce capacity expenditure with 50% and operational expenditure with 60%. Click here to read the full AVN customer case study.
The second case study talks about Keck Medical Center of USC which was in dire need of a new data warehouse for business and medical analytics but didn’t have room for the data in its conventional SAN. The center’s IT team quickly chose QlikView Business Discovery as its data management solution. Unfortunately, they also discovered that the center’s SAN lacked the necessary capacity and horsepower and that adequate funds to expand it were unavailable. With no available SAN capacity, a limited budget, and an impatient cohort of analysts, the Keck team urgently needed a more flexible and affordable storage solution. Storage they could deploy quickly with just the capacity they needed to launch. Storage they could scale easily and affordably as application requirements changed. Storage that would be easy to manage and that wouldn’t lock them into expensive proprietary hardware. The Keck team’s solution was to create a pair of storage clusters, building out existing VMware vSphere hosts (Dell PowerEdge R715 servers) with internal hard drives and Fusion-io flash drives. Click here to read the full Keck Medical Center of USC customer case study.
Over the last couple of months I have been talking to many Virtual SAN customers. After having spoken to so many customers and having heard many special use cases and configurations I’m not easily impressed. I must say that half way during the conversation with Steffan Hafnor Røstvig from TeleComputing I was seriously impressed. Before we get to that lets first look at the background of Steffan Hafnor Røstvig and TeleComputing.