Virtual Machines much like physical ones require storage. Storage, on all its forms, is exponentially growing in recent years – almost doubling every other year. With the explosion of storage demands, IT managers are challenged to deliver the same service levels to virtual environments as they do with physical ones.
VMware Virtual SAN uses a unique Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) platform that helps streamline the storage operations and allow for per-VM granular management. Due to this unique property that helps deliver an exceptionally simple storage solution, along with enterprise class performance , VMware Virtual SAN won in its first quarter of availability over 300 customers and 3 different awards.
Doing a cost comparison for storage solutions is certainly not an easy task, but an even harder one is quantifying savings in operations. We were often asked how much time and effort savings can a customer expect VMware Virtual SAN to deliver in terms of storage management.
To answer this question, VMware partnered with The Taneja Group to create a report , which will be based on testing done in their labs, for some of the more common storage tasks. The Taneja Group measured the time it took to do these tasks on a standard Fibre-Channel SAN, and then the same task with VMware Virtual SAN. Overall their findings show that 2/3 of the time and effort spent on storage operations can be saved using VMware Virtual SAN. We realize that every customer environment can be different and have a varying amount of savings, but we believe this is a good representative example.
Some of the key findings in the report are:
Deployment – VMware Virtual SAN improves on traditional architecture inflexibility by offering a per-VM capability to deliver each application a tailored server tier, without the need for multiple storage pools, reducing the time it takes to design and deploy a storage solution
Service Class Configurations – VMware Virtual SAN becomes particularly powerful when considering adjusting different performance and availability configurations for different application workloads
Capacity Scaling – VMware Virtual SAN stands to have the most obvious impact on the on-going expansion and adaptation of existing storage as demands for additional performance and capacity change over time
Service Level Planning – VMware Virtual SAN stands to significantly drive down the time and effort required for multi-disciplinary planning and configuration of service classes with the goal of optimizing the efficiency and productivity of the storage assets
Workload Reconfiguration – VMware Virtual SAN provides a way to easily and rigorously define and automate service-class based provisioning, allowing enterprises to benefit from establishing multi-tiered services. Storage can be dynamically re-aligned and optimized to serve application needs across the application’s lifecycle, requiring less time and effort with every change
The results are summarized in the graph below, and you can read the full report here.
