The Virtual SAN team has been running a public beta program for the past six months with more than 12,000 people registering online. We have received a lot of feedback during that period and wanted to share with you the experience of a few of them.
This is the first post of a series of customers talking about their experience with Virtual SAN.
Ryan Hoenle is the Director of IT at the DOE Fund. Ryan has been testing Virtual SAN, and he plans on using Virtual SAN as part of his organization’s Disaster Recovery strategy and as part of a future Virtual Desktops project he is implementing.
Among the reasons Ryan decided to implement Virtual SAN is the ability to modularize his datacenter. From our perspective, this is a very important point that might be unnoticed at first glance. If you look at how the modern datacenter is built today, you’ll see that companies like Facebook and Google are using a “break-replace” model. The benefits of such a model is that when one hardware component malfunctions, it’s easy to go and replace it with an identical piece, when In the same time there’s no interruption to operations at all. This is opposed to the more common model where when some hardware components fail it might cause disruption and down-time for application users, as well as the need to fix that specific hardware and a requirement for a specialist to that fix – extending further the downtime. In Ryan’s words “From a break fix perspective, I think there’s a huge difference in what needs to be done when a piece of hardware fails. I can have anyone on my team go back and replace a 1U or 2U servers. … essentially modularizing my datacenter and delivering a true Software-Defined Storage architecture”
Don’t you want your datacenter to look like this?
Virtual SAN enables this model by maintaining high resiliency, and making every component in the cluster easily and non-disruptively replaceable. In the event of a disk,host or a network failure Virtual SAN will alert the user and keep the effected virtual machine/s running from one of their replicas. Once the component was fixed/replaced, Virtual SAN will rebuild a copy if necessary. Everything is automated – delivering a significant operational benefit.
There are additional benefits for modularizing the data-center, like ease of expandability. We’ll talk about these benefits in one of our next blogs
To watch Ryan talk about Virtual SAN, check out the following Video:
If you’re interested in hearing new and exciting news about Virtual SAN and watch a live demo, please join us for a special live online event – March 6th 10am PST:
