Are you looking to modernize operations? Modernization can mean upgrading to enhance performance, investing in more flexibility or lowering overhead costs. After virtualizing infrastructure, we’ve seen organizations lower maintenance costs, boost storage operations agility and speed and decrease the data center footprint. The next step in planning for your organization’s future will involve determining your software and storage needs and how you will deploy new services, scale operations and increase profitability. It’s time to consider deploying hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) powered by vSAN as part of your five-year plan of infrastructure consolidation and digital transformation. It’s time to streamline your data center.
All Flash All The Time
By making the switch over to vSAN, organizations can differentiate their services in a competitive cloud marketplace while improving manageability and controlling costs. With the exact storage and resources needed, vSAN is redundant to two failures. With traditional SAN or other software-defined storage solutions, that success would be very difficult to achieve in a cost-effective manner. With the power of vSAN, has accommodated different customer requirements for performance and redundancy with a few simple clicks.
“One of the biggest business challenges we had was the cost of traditional SAN,” says Jeremyah Corner, Director of Software Development at CenturyLink. “Storage was eating our budget alive, representing the majority of our data center deployment costs.”
Software-defined storage is a simple and cost-effective way to reduce your data center footprint. For CenturyLink that meant expanding the use of all-flash storage to its entire public cloud to give all its customers consistent performance levels and deliver over 6M IOPS with all-flash clusters.
“Software-defined storage is the future and going down that path will make it easy and cost-effective for us to go all flash, all the time,” says Corner.
vSAN gives companies a competitive advantage with the ability to open new data centers while also keeping the cost and hardware footprint down. Across all industries, organizations can provide cost-efficient, all-flash performance for cloud services that suit the needs of an ever-changing business model.
Reducing the Data Center Footprint
Any business looking for improvements in efficiency and profitability needs to look into modernizing operations while cutting costs. As the third-largest telecommunications company in the United States, CenturyLink provides services to its customers through CenturyLink Cloud, one of the world’s largest VMware-based public clouds. CenturyLink reduced capital expenditures and decreased operating expenses while growing and expanding their business.
The impact of vSAN on CenturyLink’s operations is evident. Corner says they chose to build CenturyLink Cloud on “vSphere because VMware gives us consistent, API-driven deployments and it’s very easy to use.” Century Link has more than 55 data centers globally, 16 of which support CenturyLink Cloud and are 100% virtualized with VMware vSphere across approximately 3,800 hosts. If CenturyLink needs to open a new data center, hyperconverged infrastructure keeps the cost and hardware footprint down. They are able to repeat the model in a stable, efficient and standardized way resulting in reducing data center deployment costs by 50% and saving over $1.3 million in the most recent deployment.
Automated rapid deployment and simplified management decreases operating expenses. This saves you on the total cost of ownership that can’t compete with the sunk costs of a traditional data center investment. In the world of digital transformation and modernization, it’s not all talk. Making the switch to hyperconverged infrastructure has clear business value.
Speed and Agility
When all is said and done, the goal for many organizations is to achieve speed and business agility. Many hyperconverged infrastructure solutions tend to fall short when up against aggressive load tests. A more flexible and cost-effective solution outside of traditional SAN is needed to scale performance to support the latest technology. “The bottom line for why we selected VMware vSAN above any other solution was speed,” Corner said. “When subjected to our aggressive load tests, the other HCI solutions we evaluated just fell over.”
For the customers, this means better performance and better business results. “With vSAN behind CenturyLink Cloud, our customers can easily run modern apps that require huge amounts of flash storage,” says Corner. “That’s a big win for our business and our customers. Our goal is to never buy traditional storage again!”
Compared to any other hyperconverged infrastructure solution on the market, vSAN customers experience success in the three areas that truly matter: performance, availability and cost.
How can vSAN help your organization reduce its data center footprint? Learn more about the full capabilities of vSAN by reading more #vSANFan customer success stories and following us on Twitter.
