VMworld 2015 US offered another strong performance for storage and availability solutions. The conference was flooded with more than 23,000 attendants eager to hear about the latest solutions VMware was cooking. If you attended the conference, you know that the message was loud and clear: One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device. The VMware Storage and Availability solutions play a critical role in that message and below are our highlights!
Spotlight on VMware Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI)
One of the things we enjoyed this year was all of the excitement around HCI. You see, HCI is not just a deployment model, but also architecture. The solution unifies compute, storage and networking through software on industry-standard servers. It offers customers the ideal entry point to the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). Additionally, customers reap the benefits of fast deployment, increased performance, TCO savings of up to 50% and management simplicity and scalability.
With VMware, customers have options and can choose to: build their own with VSAN Ready Nodes, purchase a pre-configured appliance with EVO: RAIL, or build a complete SDDC from EVO SDDC.
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: The Ideal Architecture for SDDC
What’s New in Storage and Availability
We had several key announcements around storage, hybrid cloud, and ecosystem extensibility. Here are some highlights of our announcements:
- Virtual SAN 6.1 now offers stretched clusters, vRealize Operations Integration, new SSD HW options and 2-node cluster. For many of our VSAN enthusiasts, we also announced deduplication, erasure coding and software checksum features which are being tested and currently planned for an upcoming VSAN Q4 Beta.
- SRM 6.1 now offers policy-based management, integration with VMware NSX and automated availability and mobility for private cloud environments. What’s equally exciting was the announcement of SRM Air, an all-new orchestration solution for vCloud Air Disaster Recovery – pretty awesome right! It’s great to see how we are all aligning towards this vision of “one cloud” with seamless integration between on-prem and off-prem clouds.
- Third-party, software-based data services delivered through the new vSphere APIs for IO Filtering (i.e. VAIO) enable new capabilities that are agnostic of the storage implementation and managed alongside other capabilities from VSAN or vVols through VMware Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) in vCenter.
- Finally, we unveiled our newest offering, EVO SDDC, which is a VMware-validated software suite that provides customers the easiest, most effective path to deploy and operate a private cloud based on the SDDC architecture. EVO SDDC leverages HCI, built on VSAN of course, as a building block and delivers a complete SDDC by delivering compute, networking and storage from the hypervisor on a scale-out x86 server platform. What makes EVO SDDC unique is the new EVO SDDC Manager. This new software manages everything within that stack, including the hardware, from top to bottom, reducing deployment of these large scale systems from days to hours. We expect EVO SDDC to become available in H1 2016.
Virtual SAN 6.1, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 6.1, and vSphere APIs for IO Filtering (VAIO) became available on 9/10.
Top 2 Sessions to Check Out Now – For Free!
Here are a couple of sessions that capture the essence of our VMworld messaging. Check them out below!
- Rethinking Enterprise Storage: Rise Of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
- Building a Business Case for Virtual SAN
Experience at Solutions Exchange
Partners play a fundamental role in furthering our Software-Defined Storage vision and testament to this collaboration is the presence of storage partners and their unique solutions.
The solutions floor showcased vendors such as EMC, Dell, HP and upcoming startups such as Axcient, Arcserve, DataGravity, OneCloud Software (which had literally GA’d a couple of weeks before), and PrimaryIO – only to name a few. Here are some overarching themes from the Solutions floor:
- vSphere is gaining more strength as a platform technology
- Storage is a key building block but going through a transformation, with more options available than ever before
- Vendor-agnostic solutions were trending
- Simplicity, integration, management, automation, optimization and orchestration were trending as well
- Cloud and DR are becoming big forces and priorities for our customers
Top Takeaways
VMworld 2015 US was another exciting conference for storage and availability solutions. Even with all of our own and our partner’s exciting announcements, we have even more to look forward:
- Continuing to simplify the customer experience. This ranges from installs, upgrades, management and product interoperability. The Customer has to remain front and center of our innovation
- Delivering storage functionality, like dedupe and erasure coding, that, as a marketer would say, are points of parity (POP). In parallel, we are thinking outside this box and coming up with points of differentiation (POD) like analytics & content awareness.
- Targeting SMBs, especially for SRM. Sometimes technology needs to be adopted by smaller organizations before going mainstream for enterprise
- Continuing to offer choice. Opening our platform more and more is scary, but this bet could reap rewards of product stickiness. We have to remember that playing well with others has its benefits
Be sure to check out these blogs if you missed them during VMworld:
- VMworld Recap: Virtual SAN Use Cases and Stretched Clusters
- Introduction to VMware Site Recovery Manager Air
- What’s New – VMware Virtual SAN 6.1
- SRM 6.1 What’s New
Additional videos from VMworld can be found on our YouTube channel.
VMworld 2015 US was great, we look forward to seeing you in Barcelona!
