VMware Launches Virtual SAN Storage Product

By Kimberly Koerth

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VMware has launched VMware Virtual SAN, its first software-defined storage product.

Built directly into the VMware vSphere kernel, VMware Virtual SAN provides a new tier of hypervisor-converged storage. The software abstracts and pools internal magnetic disks and flash devices from industry-standard x86 servers to produce a high-performance and resilient shared datastore for virtual machines. According to internal benchmarks, VMware Virtual SAN performs 2 million input/output operations per second on a read-only workload on a 32 node cluster and 640,000 IOPS on a mixed workload on a 32 node cluster.

“Today VMware changes the way that storage has been operated to date,” said John Gilmartin, vice president and general manager, SDDC Suite Business Unit, VMware. “VMware Virtual SAN is a radically simple storage solution optimized for virtual environments that brings an application-centric approach to storage management. Customers that know VMware vSphere know VMware Virtual SAN, and can rely on that familiarity to hit the ground running with VMware Virtual SAN.”

VMware Virtual SAN simplifies storage provisioning and management while reducing total cost of ownership enabling a fundamentally more agile operational model, the company said. VMware Virtual SAN provides the reliability and robustness of an enterprise storage system and is resilient in protecting against data loss in the event of any hardware failures. It is ideally suited for several use cases in virtual environments such as virtual desktop infrastructure, test/development and disaster recovery.

VMware Virtual SAN is now generally available and is priced at $2,495 per processor. VMware Virtual SAN for Desktop is priced at $50 per user.