Building Software-Defined Control for Your Data Center
Borrowing heavily from concepts that were first pioneered in the development of software-defined networks (SDNs), VMware today rolled out a VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) 6 upgrade that separates the control and data planes with a software-defined storage system.
In addition, VMware for the first time is announcing support for Flash storage, which Alberto Farronato, director of product marketing at VMware, says makes VMware VSANs applicable for use in as primary storage.
Farronato says that while VMware VSAN has proven to be popular in VMware environments, usage of VSANs has been limited to secondary storage. With support for Flash storage and the ability to isolate the data and control planes, VSAN performance can both scale up and out much more easily than before.
In the release, VMware is also adding the ability to scale up to 64 nodes to provide a maximum throughput rating of 7 million IOPs across eight petabytes of storage.
Finally, VMware is also making it a lot easier to manage the overall VSAN environment with support for up to 32 snapshots per virtual machine and the ability to place virtual machine objects on specific server racks.
It’s been clear for a while now that the way storage needs to be managed in the age of virtual machines is evolving. The only difference now is that software-defined storage can now be applied at true enterprise-class scale.
