We are pleased to offer a guest post from one of our valued partners on a number of initiatives, including vSAN: Western Digital. This post previews some of the joint work of our companies and what you can find at VMworld 2017.
By Patric Chang, Sr. Director of Strategic Partner Ecosystems, Western Digital
If I were a gambling man, I’d place my bet on HCI winning the infrastructure race over the next year. For those of you that haven’t started down the hyper-converged path, then VMworld is the perfect time to learn more … and what better place to make a bet than Vegas! This year, we at Western Digital will highlight how we’re working closely with the vSAN team to help more of you modernize your data center.
Three Highlights You Shouldn’t Miss
- Newest Flash Technology Ready on Day 0 for vSAN
From PCIe/NVMe™, SAS and SATA flash and all the way to innovative SMR, Helium and air-filled HDDs, we offer a broad selection of certified drives for vSAN®, HCI and cloud solutions. You’ll find capacities ranging from 300GB to the world first 12TB[1] HDD, and flash devices up to 7.68TB with the capability of performing up to 1.2M Read IOPS per device.
Visit us at our VMworld booth to learn how these devices can be used in your next server refresh to enable an HCI solution powered by vSAN. Our experts will help you find the best performing and most cost-efficient device for your workload and software stack.
- Performance Results with Proven vSAN Devices and Configurations (Spoiler Alert: HCI is Fast!)
Second, you can speak to our storage experts on how we test hyper-converged solutions like vSAN using our performance testbeds in our Data Propulsion Lab™ to bring definitive data to vSAN administrators and ReadyNode design teams. Learn more about our testing learnings here.
We have worked closely with various server OEM companies, like Lenovo™, HPE and Cisco®, to deliver proven reference architectures and vSAN ReadyNodes™. At VMworld, we will talk about three vSAN cluster testbeds from different server companies.
One example is the configuration below using Lenovo System X 3650 M5 series servers and various SAS SSDs from our Ultrastar® family. In this configuration we tested the delivery of over 650,000 Read IOPS on a 4-node cluster with 4 disk groups per node and over 1 million Read IOPS on an 8-node cluster with 2 disk groups per node[2].
Fig 1: One of the three vSAN Clusters in the Data Propulsion Lab vSAN Test Bed – over 1 million Read IOPS on an 8-node cluster
Another example, below, is an all-NMVe vSAN configuration. We’re proud to be a leader in NVMe technology. Just last week, we received the PCIe NVMe SSDs award at the Flash Memory Summit, voted by IT professionals from around the world. NVMe is a disruptive technology, and VMworld will be a great opportunity to understand how it can greatly benefit your vSAN or HCI solution.
In our booth, you’ll be able to see an all-flash, all-NVMe -powered vSAN solutions delivering 61TB of all-NVMe flash capacity on a 2U unit!
Fig 2: One of the vSAN-Driven Solutions using HGST PCIe NVMe Drives on show at VMworld
- Enabling Cloud to Edge with vSAN
Lastly, come see how our products and solutions are used all the way from edge devices and data centers to the public clouds. Whether it is our NVMe SSDs that deliver performance and low latency optimized for hyperscale data centers and cloud workloads, our CloudSpeed™ II SATA SSDs with superior performance or high-capacity helium HDDs – our solutions are heavily relied on by cloud providers as an essential part of their infrastructure to run VMware Cloud, vSAN and ESXi.
Learn More at VMworld
Make sure to stop by the HGST booth, where you will be able to see the combined products and solutions from Western Digital and VMware. You will have the opportunity to talk to our subject matter experts and see a broad portfolio of solutions and results of the long and close collaboration we have with VMware in virtualization solutions.
You can also hear our subject matter experts at the following speaking sessions.
Monday, August 28
Title: New Architectures for Virtualizing Spark and Big Data Workloads
5:30 pm
Session: [VIRT1351BU]
Speakers: Justin Murray and Potheri Mohan from VMware; guest appearance: Jonathan Flynn, Virtualization Technologist
Tuesday, August 29
Title: Amplifying VMware vSAN Performance: A Deep Dive into Testing and Tuning (with Lessons Learned)
5:30 pm
Session: [STO2591BU]
Speaker: Jonathan Flynn, Virtualization Technologist
Wednesday, August 30
Title: Three Ways to Use VMware’s New Cross-Cloud SaaS Services to Efficiently Run Workloads Across AWS, Azure, and vSphere
12:30 pm
Session: [MMC3074BU]
Speaker: Burt Toma from VMware, Jason Walker, Principal Virtualization Architect
Title: Modernize your Infrastructure with vSAN and HCI for Data Centers and Clouds
12:30 pm
Session: [STO3373PUS]
Speakers: John Nicholson from VMware, Dror Goldenberg from Mellanox, Jonathan Flynn and
Patric Chang, Senior Director from Western Digital
Join us and see how you can harness the power of data. Hear about some of the exciting highlights discussed with VMware’s VP of Products, Lee Caswell, in this video. I look forward to seeing you at the show!
[1] One MB is equal to one million bytes, one GB is equal to one billion bytes and one TB equals 1,000GB (one trillion bytes) when referring to hard drive capacity. Accessible capacity will vary from the stated capacity due to formatting and partitioning of the hard drive, the computer’s operating system, and other factors.
[2] Based on tests conducted by Western Digital’s Data Propulsion Lab™ using HCIBench.
