VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) is radically simple, hyper-converged storage for virtualized environments. Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) leverages the hypervisor to deliver compute, networking and shared storage from a single x86 platform. In addition to being incredibly simple to deploy and provision, Virtual SAN allows you to scale storage and compute resources, eliminating costly forklift upgrades. Every VSAN cluster can scale out one node at a time or scale up by adding capacity to existing hosts, and achieve over 8 PB of raw storage capacity.
Over 2,000 Virtual SAN customers (and counting) have reaped the benefits of implementing this hyper-converged storage solution. In this blog post, we dive into four unique customer stories and the simplicity, agility, manageability and cost savings Virtual SAN delivered for their businesses.
Simplicity
One of the most common Virtual SAN benefits we hear from our customers is how simple it is to provision and to manage. Because Virtual SAN (VSAN) is seamlessly embedded in the hypervisor, installation and configuration are done with a few mouse clicks from the vSphere Web Client (check out the 3-minute demo here). This simplicity is what drew Cloud Carib to consider Virtual SAN. Cloud Carib knew their existing architecture was no match for the increasing demand they were experiencing and with company revenues doubling annually, in reality, adding external hybrid storage arrays was just not going to work well for them in the long term. Cloud Carib’s 15-person IT team had to expand its data center capacity and compute performance without the corresponding increase in costs and complexity.
For these reasons, Cloud Carib chose hyper-converged storage technology – VMware Virtual SAN. As a result, Cloud Carib has experienced increased performance, improved productivity, lower CapEx and OpEx, and increased scalability. Despite Virtual SAN being a completely new technology for the Cloud Carib IT team, the team did the deployment themselves and it took just over one week for 4 of their engineers to install, test and have Virtual SAN in full production – they now have 100 percent virtualized storage. To learn how Virtual SAN has simplified storage, deployment and scalability for Cloud Carib, read the entire case study here.
Agility
There is no ‘one size fits all’ storage solution to meet the needs of customers: a storage solution must have the flexibility and agility to meet changes in demand and customer needs at the drop of a hat. Itrica, a company that provides compliant software and cloud solutions to the medical industry, had large multi-tenant hosting environments that forced them to use one storage solution to meet the needs of all of their customers. “We needed a solution that is very elastic, very scalable, and lets us grow with our customers and deliver the I/O requirements our customers need,” explained Itrica CTO David Sampson.
Itrica chose VMware Virtual SAN to enable them to custom engineer I/O and scale on-demand for the unique needs of their customers, all while using less power and cooling. Virtual SAN allows users to experience up to 90K OPS per host with all flash and scale up to 64 hosts per cluster, allowing companies to scale up quickly and efficiently. With the hypervisor-converged solution provided by Virtual SAN, Itrica has been able to allocate data center resources more efficiently and reduce costs. Listen to David Sampson, CTO of Itrica, discuss how a modular approach to storage has enabled Itrica to be more agile and to build solutions that scale:
Manageability
The hyper-converged storage solution Virtual SAN offers is not only easy to set up, but also easy to manage and provision. From key business applications to virtual desktops, customers trust Virtual SAN to keep their businesses running. VSAN customer Cincinnati Bell Technology Services (CBTS) was able to build a scalable cloud infrastructure solution with lower costs than traditional SAN environments. As a cloud service provider, CBTS had to ensure that its storage choice could be easily managed and provisioned, without sacrificing performance. As a result, CBTS has been able to reduce costs, improve inventory management, bring assets online faster and bill for them quickly.
To learn more about CBTS and their Virtual SAN journey, listen to the entire customer story below:
Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
The beauty of Virtual SAN hyper-converged storage product is that you can deploy it on inexpensive industry standard x86 servers which, for customers, eliminates large up-front investments and allows them to grow at their own pace. Over time, this drastically lowers TCO while providing a high performance and scalable storage solution. Virtual SAN customer Union Hospital was faced with aging hardware and maxed-out resources and had to decide whether to replace its existing storage system or migrate to a completely different platform.
After evaluating solutions from several vendors, it chose to purchase VMware Virtual SAN. This decision has saved them money, solved key application performance challenges, delivered scalability, and freed up operational resources, positioning Union Hospital for future expansion. To learn how Union Hospital Addresses Storage, Performance, and Cost Concerns with VMware Virtual SAN Solution, read the entire case study here.
If you are curious to see what VSAN can save you, click here to use the free TCO Calculator Tool.
How Could You Benefit from Virtual SAN?
Our customers have firsthand experience on the simplicity, agility, manageability, and cost savings experienced from VMware Virtual SAN. Coupled with these benefits, VSAN’s adoption falls across many different industries. Now, it’s your turn to see what VSAN can do for you. Validate Virtual SAN’s benefits for your organization by requesting a free Virtual SAN Assessment today. This free, one-week analysis can reveal where Virtual SAN can reduce cost and eliminate complexity.
To read additional Virtual SAN success stories, visit our VMware Virtual SAN Customer Success Stories page. Go VSAN!
