While no technology is ever “future proof,” we all hope that any big technology purchase will last and give us a satisfactory return on our investment. We look for assurance that it can not only take advantage of the newest and flashiest applications and technologies, but also have the agility and extensibility to adopt newer and better technologies in the future.
With the fast pace of technological change happening in the datacenter, users – especially those shopping for traditional, purpose-built systems – often feel paralyzed or scared to pull the trigger on new purchases.
For example, when considering infrastructure solutions it’s important for it to accommodate the growing number of workloads required for today’s digital businesses. In this survey done by TechTarget, you’ll see the breath of workloads being run by HCI customers today.
Which workloads do you have running on this hyperconverged infrastructure?
Source: TechTarget Data Center Landscape Study, July 2016
And we know there are new application and next-gen applications coming online every day. Because of these heterogeneous and evolving environments, it’s important for vSAN to perform well with mixed workloads, which is why a lot of testing has been done and continues to be done with ERP, Databases, VDI, Hadoop, only to name a few.
Here are 3 ways vSAN can help you scale to tomorrow and feel confident that your investments will last and will evolve with new technologies on the horizon:
vSAN Allows You to Accelerate Adoption of Next Gen Hardware
In a survey done by TechTarget, 44% of customers currently using HCI adopted it during their normal refresh cycle (server or storage), 39% adopted it for a specific use case or application and the remaining 17% introduced it to increase capacity for one reason or another. As you can see, a huge trigger for HCI adoption is server or storage refresh and because traditional SAN/NAS arrays face longer refresh cycles (~5 years) and longer development times, they are slow to adopt new hardware.
HCI and vSAN use x86 servers, which have a faster refresh cycle and much faster development times, which means customers can take advantage of the latest flash technologies much sooner. And with declining flash prices, customers can enjoy the performance that flash devices like NVMe and the upcoming Intel Purley processor offer – no more waiting for a major hardware refresh from your traditional infrastructure vendor! In addition, the underlying server hardware can non-disruptively be changed if technology from one vendor meets your needs sooner in the future.
If you think about the scale-out architecture of HCI, where you simply add a node (v86 server) for compute and storage, you ultimately increase capacity and performance non-disruptively and on-demand. That means that you’re growing over time, and every time you grow you’re able to deploy the latest and greatest technologies.
vSAN Allows You to Prepare for Any Workload
A lot of organizations are still wrapping their heads around cloud native applications (CNAs), containers, and wonder how to effectively introduce them into their environments. Not only that, customers still have to deal with their day-to-day workloads like VDI, ROBO, DR, BCAs only to name a few. The good news is that vSAN can accommodate all these workloads and has been architected to take advantage of CNAs and Containers with the VMware Photon Platform. The photon platform allows customers to retain the security, control and performance of the datacenter while running their cloud native workloads. Learn more about vSAN and the Photon Platform here.
There’s also a lot of testing currently being done to make sure that vSAN can perform well with big data, Citrix XD/XA, Splunk, SAP HANA etc. For customers looking to expand their applications now and even in the future, vSAN becomes THE architecture that can easily scale to these new applications.
vSAN Provides a Seamless Path to the Full SDDC and Hybrid Cloud
You’ve probably heard us say that VMware’s HCI solutions (vSAN + vSphere + vCenter) provide a foundation for the software-defined data center (SDDC). This is true! Combine vSAN with NSX and voila you have a full SDDC. Customers can accelerate their move to the SDDC with VMware Cloud Foundation which is a unified SDDC platform that brings simplicity of installation and management.
In the same token, customers can extend their enterprise storage platform from on-premise deployments to the public cloud with the VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture while maintaining a consistent experience across both. If you haven’t yet, check out our announcements around IBM Cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS.
If you are a customer who is still on the fence about vSAN and HCI, simply start by taking a Hands-on-Lab. It’s the fasted and easiest way to test-drive the full technical capabilities of vSAN.
There’s also a lot of technical documentation on the StorageHub to get you educated.
