Recently got together to record a PodCast with Bill Borsari, who heads up our System Engineering team, and he gave us the straight talk, directly from our customers, on where vSAN works perfectly for them, and where the greater performance, scale, flexibility and consolidation capabilities of Datera and enterprise software defined storage (SDS) take over. Bill has vast industry experience, and more importantly is deeply involved in architecting every Datera customer solution. I encourage you to take a listen, please click the image.
We “Co-Exist” alongside some of the most iconic names in the data storage kingdom, quite often in data centers built by the largest and most innovative companies in the world. This provides a very unique venue and perspective for Datera.
vSAN was originally designed by VMware to allow smaller companies to quickly deploy a virtual “SAN” without the need to buy proprietary gear from the likes of HDS, EMC, NetApp or IBM. From these humble origins, vSphere customers large and small, now flock to the technology, driven by the siren songs of reduced complexity/cost and more flexibility…while expecting all the performance, availability and storage services delivered by the traditional, controller based storage arrays that have ruled the back end of the datacenter for decades. For smaller clusters, and highly predictable workloads, it meets their needs.
What we hear from vSAN customers, is they have built a wide assortment of specifically crafted vSAN clusters through the years. One day they realize they are managing 20-40 loosely federated clusters, and are still stuck with 3-5 year migration cycles. The common word we hear often is “outgrown.”
vSAN customers move to Datera to regain the performance, flexibility, consolidation and dis-aggregation of storage that only a massively scalable, software defined data platform like Datera offers. We were originally architected to deliver on the most demanding use cases, and performant workloads.
The Takeaway
vSAN mates well with VMware customers, but only to a point. As the workloads begin to become less predictable, and more demanding, the architectural limits of vSAN can induce a managerial mess of multiple clusters. And, the simplicity that lets you rapidly deploy a restricted set of low cost servers, can lock you in to the same 3-5 year migration cycles that plague traditional storage arrays.
With SDS, and specifically with the Datara Data Services Platform, you may never need to migrate. Add new generations of compute, storage media, even mix and match different vendors within the same cluster, all to continuously adapt to the rapidly changing business and application needs of your internal and external customers.
For more information, we recommend reading our white papers:
Built for Autonomous Operations
Built for Continuous Availability
We can schedule a demo at any time. Please reach us at sales@datera.io and share any specific capability you would like to learn more about. We look forward to the opportunity!