When we launched VMware Cloud Flex Storage last year, we embarked on a journey to deliver an enterprise-class disaggregated cloud storage and data management service that is fully managed by VMware. Since then, we have seen many customers adopt this natively integrated solution to elastically scale their storage capacity on VMware Cloud on AWS.
Today, at AWS re:Invent 2023, we are announcing a new disaggregated m7i.metal-24xl instance for VMware Cloud on AWS (link here) that will offer more flexibility and choice to VMware Cloud Flex Storage customers. With this announcement, customers will soon have the option to choose between three instance types, which include i3en.metal, i4i.metal and m7i.metal-24xl. Previously, when creating a SDDC cluster, customers had to provision instances that included locally attached storage with vSAN. With the new disaggregated instance, customers have the ability to create SDDC clusters without any locally attached storage. When you create disaggregated SDDC clusters through the VMware Cloud Services Console, you can provision VMware Cloud Flex Storage and attach it to the SDDC.
The new m7i.metal-24xl instance provides a new disaggregated infrastructure option for VMware Cloud on AWS customers, enabling them to better align compute, memory and storage resources with the needs of their applications and use cases. By connecting VMware Cloud Flex Storage to a disaggregated m7i.metal-24xl instance within their Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), customers can scale compute and storage independently, while provisioning storage capacity seamlessly with a few clicks from the VMware Cloud Services Console. Together with the hyperconverged instance types, m7i.metal-24xl and VMware Cloud Flex Storage will offer customers greater flexibility and value in terms of scalability, performance, resilience, and cost.
Market Landscape
Digital transformation in upending industries in new ways, and accelerating existing forces, including cloud adoption and the explosion of applications and data (2 zettabytes in 2010 to 612 zettabytes by 2030[1]).
In addition to the growth in data volumes, customers’ storage requirements have become more complex and diverse. As a result, the ideal approach to storing data is not one size fits all, but one that is customized to the underlying characteristics of the workload and the data. One way to address this need is by disaggregating compute from storage, which empowers IT teams to independently allocate and scale both resources. This gives customers the ability to flexibly and cost-effectively address specific use cases where the balance between storage and compute resource consumption is important.
In addition to the exponential growth of data, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) applications have also become integral to businesses, driving insights, automation, and innovation. The need for specialized solutions tailored to AI/ML workloads arises from the unique demands of these technologies. They generate and process vast amounts of data, requiring performant, reliable, and scalable storage architectures. Businesses need to efficiently manage and store massive datasets, facilitate rapid data access for training models, and support complex computations.
As the market evolves and customers’ requirements change, it has become increasingly important to provide more choice and flexibility to customers to address these needs.
VMware Cloud Flex Storage with the New Disaggregated Architecture
Diagram 1: Leveraging VMware Cloud Flex Storage with the different VMware Cloud on AWS instance types.
VMware Cloud on AWS currently offers two hyperconverged instance types, i3en.metal and i4i.metal. With storage optimization of VMware vSAN compression, they can provide 50TB and 30TB raw local NVMe flash storage per host, respectively. Customers can use VMware Cloud Flex Storage as supplemental storage to add storage capacity by mounting NFS datastores to the SDDC clusters.
For the upcoming m7i.metal-24xl disaggregated instance, customers would be able to scale storage and compute completely independently by adding storage capacity granularly with VMware Cloud Flex Storage as needed. With a few simple steps, customers can add the m7i.metal-24xl host type to their cluster and create datastores to connect to the SDDC.
For all instance types, customers will be able to scale up to 3.2PiB. VMware Cloud Flex Storage will soon support a maximum of 4 datastores per cluster, and 800TiB of usable storage capacity per NFS datastore. It will also deliver high performance and reliable low latency needed to run enterprise mission-critical applications.
Customer Benefits
- Scalable and Elastic: Leveraging VMware Cloud Flex Storage with the m7i.metal-24xl instance type’s disaggregated architecture allows customers to scale compute and storage independently. Customers can elastically scale storage capacity up or down as needed based on their business requirements. Designed for high performance, VMware Cloud on AWS ensures reliability and data integrity while supporting modern workloads.
- Simplified Operations: VMware Cloud Flex Storage is fully managed by VMware. VMware sells, operates, and supports the full service as a single vendor solution. The solution is also fully integrated into VMware Cloud on AWS. Once customers add a m7i.metal-24xl cluster to their SDDC, they will be able to seamlessly add storage capacity with VMware Cloud Flex Storage to their cluster.
- Predictable Cloud Economics: VMware Cloud Flex Storage represents a very cost-effective storage solution. Customers can provision storage capacity granularly and pay only for the resources they consume. In addition, VMware Cloud Flex Storage is sold via a simple $/GiB pricing model without any hidden costs, making it predictable for customers to forecast their spend.
We are excited to extend this service to more architectures, so we can deliver the scalability and elasticity needed to support the diverse requirements of today’s workloads.
Learn More
For more information on this announcement and for more information on VMware Cloud Flex Storage, please visit the VMware Cloud Flex Storage Product Page. If you’re ready to to explore your options and begin your journey with VMware Cloud Flex Storage, please reach out to your VMware salesperson or partner for more information.
[1] Source: Statistica Digital Economy Compass
