This is an exciting time in the IT world as the fast pace of innovation and new technology seems to be accelerating every day. We’re seeing the rapid emergence of new flash technologies, a shift to a software-defined world with hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), new cross-cloud architectures, and a change in how software and applications are architected.
At VMware, we’re focused on accelerating the adoption of all of these technologies, and maybe no solution is better situated to touch all of these trends than VMware vSAN. Today, I want to highlight and expand on our recent announcements around vSAN and VMware Photon Platform that touch several of these key trends: the growth of HCI, cloud-native applications and container infrastructure.
Photon Platform Basics
Photon Platform, announced the other week at VMworld Barcelona, is designed to deliver developers the productivity and agility of the public cloud, but with the cost, security, and control of a private data center.
So what is it exactly? We describe Photon Platform as an Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure Platform that enables IT to deliver on-demand tools and services developers need to build and run modern applications while retaining security, control and performance of the datacenter. At the heart of Photon Platform is the leading hypervisor, ESXi; however, we have designed Photon to be managed through APIs without any dependencies on vCenter, which allows us to offer a streamlined hypervisor specifically architected for cloud native applications with natively-integrated enterprise container infrastructure support.
Two other key parts of the platform include the Photon Controller that provides a scale-out control plane for large-scale deployments and the Photon OS that delivers a native, lightweight container runtime.
Photon Platform doesn’t stop there. It extends beyond just compute by incorporating the industry leading software-defined networking (NSX) and software-defined storage technologies (vSAN). These technologies form the infrastructure foundation for Photon delivering the performance, reliability and ease-of-use required for cloud native workloads.
vSAN Storage Services for Photon Platform
Before getting to the specifics of the vSAN services in Photon Platform, it’s important to understand that vSAN brings the advantages of HCI0—native server-based storage, efficient performance and cost, and flexible de
ployments—to containers and cloud-native applications regardless of the underlying platform: this includes vSphere, vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC), and Photon Platform.
For Photon Platform, we’ve taken the integration to the next level by specifically-engineering vSAN for Photon Platform to match the needs of the DevOps community by promoting the developer to a first class citizen and providing agile storage operations. The solution delivers persistent, server-based storage for next-generation applications that is managed solely via APIs, providing the vSAN storage services that are decoupled from vCenter Server and the vSphere Web Client. The vSAN services in Photon Platform are managed 100% on-demand through APIs.
The integrated solution with vSAN storage services are designed to help deliver the following advantages:
- Proven Persistent Shared Storage: Deliver the resiliency and availability characteristics found in enterprise-class shared storage but that are lacking in the simple, local storage solutions often used for next-generation applications. With Photon Platform and vSAN services, next-generation applications benefit from hyper-converged storage and compute as well as seamless application failover and rapid recovery. Advanced storage features, such as deduplication, compression and high availability, are all part of the core solution.
- Programmable Operations: Streamline IT processes between application developers and IT operations teams by eliminating traditional, siloed roles with programmable access. With Photon Platform, vSAN is decoupled from vCenter Server, providing a rich set of APIs for developers to use to directly administer and consume storage. Developers are elevated to first class citizens in the data center, enabling more agile application development.
- Elastic, Flexible Storage: Scale the environment out or up as needed to meet changing application needs by non-disruptively adding new servers for additional compute and storage or expand out the capacity in existing nodes.
- New Economies for Next-Gen Apps: Deploy HCI built on low-cost, commodity server components for next-generation application and container infrastructure to dramatically reduce capital costs. Developers benefit from an affordable all-flash solution, which means less time spent managing and tuning performance, leading to better end user experiences.
One Platform: Traditional Applications to Containers
We’re very excited to deliver an integral part of the Photon Platform infrastructure with vSAN. This new architecture will help enable modern IT organizations to enjoy a best-in-class developer experience built on proven, persistent storage with the cost, security and control advantages of the private cloud.
To learn more about VMware vSAN, check out the product page at http://www.vmware.com/products/virtual-san.html
To learn more about Photon Platform, check the product page at http://www.vmware.com/products/photon-platform.html
