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.

Duncan Epping brings us a great VSAN story today — a very early VSAN adopter who now is intent on replacing as much of their existing storage environment as possible with VSAN.

For United Utilities, it’s a perfect storm of lower cost, amazing performance and a simplified operational model.  All future storage requirements are going on VSAN unless there’s a really good reason not to.

But it’s not as easy as it sounds, as there are predictable organizational issues at hand 🙂

A great read!

Having been a student of how new tech finds it way into data centers, I am always impressed by how many IT professionals strike this great balance between getting the benefits from the new thing — and managing potential risk.

As I talk to VSAN users, the pattern emerges.  They certainly see the potential as compared to traditional storage, but are proceeding prudently.

Today’s story has to be anonymous — not everyone wants their name used.  Perfectly reasonable.  Let’s call our VSAN adopter Ken, just to keep things simple. Continue reading →

So much enterprise IT is delivered by small, lean teams that have to wear many hats to get the job done.

I had a chance to recently interview Serge Kovarsky, who is using VSAN more and more to get his job done — and make things simpler in the process.

Serge is part of a four-person infrastructure team for Baron Capital Management.  He was one of the earlier VSAN adopters, but — it seems — has turned into a big enthusiast. Continue reading →

One of the things I enjoy doing is getting VSAN customers on the phone, interview them and share their stories here.

But sometimes a VSAN customer is moved to write their own blog post.

Today’s happy VSAN story comes from Jeff Wong, who works for a large Australian company.  He’s responsible for a multi-site Horizon deployment, and is quite happy with his choice.

In this post, he shares his thought process behind his decision.   A quick read, but very illustrative on how real-world IT decisions are made.

Thanks, Jeff, for sharing!

More and more IT pros are starting to really appreciate what makes VSAN so unique in the market: performance, reliability, cost-effectiveness and utterly simple to manage.

Duncan Epping shares a story today about how SynchroNet is using VSAN to deliver world-class services to their clients.  A great read with some nice technical detail!

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2015/06/11/synchronet-leverages-virtual-san-to-provide-scale-agility-and-reduced-costs-to-their-customers/

IT service providers can be some of the most demanding IT users on the planet.

Why?  They serve very demanding customers.  And there are plenty of competitors doing similar things.

At the same time, they have to keep a watchful eye on costs, as margins can be thin.  Better, faster, cheaper — they demand all three!  As a category, IT service providers generally spend serious effort evaluating technology as part of their core business model.

Recently, Duncan Epping posted a deeper look at what IndonesianCloud is doing today with VSAN.  So far, they’re quite happy — and are planning to do much more.

An interesting read!