Guest Blog By Michael Letschin, Field CTO of Nexenta
Let’s go on a little journey through the world of IT storage in the past few years. We saw monolithic large storage arrays start to get displaced with midrange and departmental arrays. We then found that the performance of those arrays, was not exactly what we needed. The introduction of all flash arrays, while meeting performance requirements, often had challenges around availability and how to scale best. More recently, we have seen a proliferation of the hyper-converged platforms to meet the needs of performance and scalability, while reducing cost, size, and complexity. Should be everything we need to run our enterprise. Right?
Not necessarily. Some arrays provided additional data services, while others did not, requiring sometimes complicated and costly 3rd party solutions, managed separately. Hyper-convergence has primarily focused on making infrastructure simple to deploy, scale, and manage, primarily around storage and compute needs, with disjointed data services.
If you are running a virtualized infrastructure using VMware vSphere, then VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) is the logical choice for your hyper-converged platform. NexentaConnect adds file services to Virtual SAN without the complexity of having to manage them independently. NexentaConnect takes advantage of VMware’s Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) to provide flexibility, availability, and performance capabilities for file services.
Curious to learn more about how NexentaConnect works with VMware Virtual SAN? Cormac Hogan gave a brief overview in October, and more detail in July. Want to see it more? Take a look at the recorded webinar with Rawlinson Rivera on Software-Defined Storage and VMware.
Or even better – try us out in the Hands On Labs at VMworld US or Europe:
HOL-SDC-1608 VMware VSAN A to Z Module 7: Extending VirtualSAN with Additional File Services
What makes this even better is starting September 1, 2015, all VSAN customers get NexentaConnect compliments of Nexenta and VMware, all you need is a registration. Simply go to http://nexenta.com/VSANand download NexentaConnect. You will automatically get a 45-day trial. Enter your cluster ID into the website after installation you will get your own product licenses and full year of product updates and support.
