VMware Launches Virtual SAN 6 and vSphere Virtual Volumes for Software-Defined Storage

VMware, Inc. today advanced to the next phase of its software-defined storage strategy with the launch of VMware Virtual SAN™ 6, and VMware vSphere® Virtual Volumes™.

To achieve the full potential of the software-defined data center, a new software-defined storage approach is required to address storage-related operational complexity and cost challenges. VMware’s software-defined storage strategy leverages the hypervisor to advance storage in the cloud era and deliver the kind of operational efficiency that server virtualization brought to compute.

“Customers have told us they need a simple, cost-effective and cloud-aware approach to storage,” said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president and general manager, Software-Defined Data Center Division, VMware. “VMware Virtual SAN 6 and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will deliver on this, and represent the next phase of our software-defined storage strategy. They address customer requirements through an improved hypervisor-converged storage tier, and a new virtual machine-aware integration with existing storage arrays.”

VMware Virtual SAN 6 features:

•  New all-flash architecture – VMware Virtual SAN 6 will enable a two-tier all-flash architecture in which flash devices are intelligently used for both caching and data persistence.
•  Maximum throughput of seven million IOPS / cluster – A 64-node VMware Virtual SAN cluster will deliver up seven million input/output operations per second (IOPS) with nearly perfect linear scalability.
•  Scalability increased to 64 nodes / cluster – The new release will double scalability to 64 nodes per cluster enabling customers to achieve up to 6,400 virtual machines per cluster and exceed eight petabytes of storage capacity from a cluster.

·         New enterprise-grade snapshots – The release will introduce a high-performance and efficient snapshot capability increasing the snapshot depth to 32 per virtual machine while minimizing the performance overhead.

·         New Rack-awareness – VMware Virtual SAN 6 will enable intelligent placement of virtual machine objects across server racks for enhanced application availability even in case of complete rack failures.

•  Expanded support for blades – With new support for direct-attached JBODs, customers will be able to scale VMware Virtual SAN 6 clusters to large capacity in server blade environments.

VMware Virtual SAN shifts the management model for storage from the device to the application, enabling administrators to provision storage for applications in minutes. In just nine months since its initial release, more than 1,000 customers have purchased VMware Virtual SAN. Customers have selected VMware Virtual SAN because of its ease of management, its deep integration with the VMware stack, and its high-performance with elastic scalability, and its ability to lower total cost of ownership.

Availability

VMware Virtual SAN 6 and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes are expected to become available in Q1 2015.