Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) powered by VMware vSAN is helping customers worldwide move forward with their digital transformation. Today, over 30,000 customers have trusted HCI-powered VMware vSAN in their data center, the public cloud and at the edge. As we recently talked to our customers from around the world, we found some commonalities in their stories. We’d like to share the three most usually mentioned benefits of adopting vSAN: lower total cost of ownership, accelerated operations and a path to a hybrid cloud.
Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
The traditional data center is built with three-tier architecture, making it capital-intensive and costly to maintain. To help reduce costs at a time when IT investments remain stable, our customers are turning to HCI powered by vSAN to get the most out of their purchases. Customers commonly cited vSAN’s ability to be deployed on standard x86 servers as a way to lower storage costs. vSAN. In addition to lowering lower upfront costs, it reduces operational costs by shrinking the data center footprint, power usage and cooling costs, equating to significant cost savings, particularly in a time of rising energy prices.
“One of the biggest business challenges we had was the cost of traditional SAN. Storage was eating our budget alive, representing the majority of our data center development costs.” Jeremyah Corner, Director of Software Development of Century Link
“Deploying vSphere and vSAN got rid of legacy three-tier architecture. We can adopt a simplified hyperconverged scalable architecture, which helped us in reducing TCO(Total Cost of Ownership).” Aket Dingal, Senior Vice President, Head of IT, JM Financial Asset Management Limited.
Accelerate Operations
Another challenge enterprises face with traditional three-tier architecture is the separate management of each infrastructure component. Each separate management system is overseen by a dedicated specialist. IT admins can spend weeks provisioning the infrastructure to support new applications, making it cumbersome and less efficient.
VMware HCI powered by vSAN architecture allows a single team of IT admins to manage their compute and storage environment from tools they already know, vCenter and the vSphere client. IT administrators experience a faster learning curve adopting vSAN because they use a familiar and extensible management solution. According to a Compass Partner study, VMware HCI reduces time spent on routine tasks by more than 50% with simplified processes performed by a unified infrastructure team*. With administrators reducing time spent on manual, repeatable tasks, they can focus on value-add tasks that move the business forward. The key to vSAN’s ability to reduce time on tasks is storage policy-based management, or SPBM. SPBM allows IT admins to set policies for application requirements for capability, performance, availability and more in vCenter. This automation increases business agility and reduces manual interventions for common tasks, monitoring and troubleshooting.
“The simplicity of management that we are already familiar with from VMware vSphere is reflected in the VMware vSAN solution. This allows us to manage our storage very easily and centrally from familiar VMware vCenter Server management tool.” Giovanni Govaerts, IT Manager Modemakers
“For me, as an IT manager, simple management is the great added value of vSAN. For our users that – unnoticed – they can at least maintain their efficiency and productivity.” Giovanni Govaerts, IT Manager Modemakers
“From an Operational point of view, [the common set of management tools from vSAN] make day-to-day administration much simpler. Convergence and simplicity are critical.” Mike Howell, Chief Group Head of Infrastructure Services – Rentokil Initial
Developer and Multi-Cloud Ready
VMware HCI powered by vSAN enables a future-proof IT environment, with support for today’s traditional applications and new cloud-native applications. VMware HCI powered by vSAN integrates with VMware Tanzu to provide a single storage platform for virtual machines (VMs) and containers. It provides developers with the self-service capabilities to create apps at scale while providing IT administrators the governance and insights to manage the infrastructure.
On the hybrid, VMware vSAN’s flexible architecture allows IT to extend it to cloud providers to a multi-cloud operating model. VMware vSAN is a key component of VMware Cloud Foundation hybrid cloud platform, built on a full-stack HCI technology. The platform can extend to the public cloud like Amazon with VMware Cloud on AWS and other top cloud providers – Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba, Oracle and over 500 public cloud providers, further simplifying cross-cloud workload migration. This flexibility is key for IT and development teams to move swiftly and efficiently to innovate faster than the competition.
“By streamlining provisioning, we can deploy code faster with fewer errors and speed rolling out new services to customers.” Homes.com
“It is the software defined infrastructure from VMware vSAN that offers Modemakers more flexibility and enables a trajectory to the cloud.” Gionvanni Govaerts, IT Manager Modemakers
“Our goal is clear. We don’t want technology that just adds more complexity into the mix. We want flexible, modern, automated solutions that seamlessly integrate without us having to design and develop inter-systems communication loops each time. This is why we turned to VMware.” Paulo Domingos, Information Systems Architecture, BAI
Why Switch to VMware vSAN
VMware HCI powered by vSAN is key to a company’s digital transformation to modernize its data center. Its flexible architecture simplifies the complexity of IT environments so our customers can innovate faster, save money and expand to any cloud their business requires. Our customers are seeing BIG PAYOFF from VMware HCI powered by vSAN. Are you ready to start your journey with VMware vSAN?
Resources:
vSAN Website: Get more detailed information about VMware vSAN and resources to get you started down the path to HCI
vSAN Free Trial: Get a hands-on HCI experience via an easy-to-use online environment
VMware HCI Assessment: Start with a free vSAN assessment to quickly understand how vSAN could fit into your environment today
VMware Storage Blogs “Virtual Blocks”: Gain insights into current trends and developments in HCI
Tech Zone- Technical Resource: Technical resources and documents to help you at every stage with HCI, from evaluation to optimization
VMware vSAN YouTube Channel: videos on HCI powered by vSAN, such as demos, new feature presentations
*Compass Partners. “VMware HCI Application Study.” Radu Delacroix and Susan Wright, September 2020
