What to base HCI on? Companies that have implemented it have their favorite

We have had the pleasure to tell you about hyper-converged IT infrastructure. It's time to move on to practice, so choose a specific solution. Let's start with memory.

In the material about HCI (hyper-converged IT infrastructure) we presented to you in a somewhat general terms the advantages of connecting elements of this infrastructure into one cooperating ecosystem - in fact it is one product that is in effect easy to manage and highly scalable. One of the most important elements of any IT network is the so-called storage - the space in which our company's or organization's data is located.

In that material, we paid special attention to the Vmware offer, for a very simple reason: as the only company operating on the IT market, it offers a complete solution, providing the customer with a basically ready and working data center out of the box . Therefore, it seems logical to pay attention to the storage solution from this company, and thus vSAN.

Spider's Web is too small an organization with too low complexity for us to be tempted to test vSAN. That is why we decided to check who uses it. After all, the best verification of product capabilities and quality is how it works in the real world - not the manufacturer's advertising leaflet.

Who uses Vmware vSAN?

Vmware clearly anticipated our doubts. The site dedicated to the stories of its clients is so extensive and contains so many items that its creators have even introduced a filter that allows you to view those organizations that use a particular solution. The list of those using vSAN is impressive.

In the category of public administration clients we will find, among others, the Berlin city clearing service, a Colorado university, the British army and even the city of Las Vegas. A visit to the website of the Polish Public Information Bulletin resulted in even more interesting finds: the vSAN is used, among others, by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, marshal offices, police and some ministries, as well as prestigious Polish state universities.

What about the private sector? Take the commercial sector as an example. And here on the list we will find very serious companies, including Coop Danmark, Rent-A-Center and William Hill. In Poland vSAN also has a National Cloud Operator based on the VMware Cloud Foundation platform.

It is worth emphasizing that these are not trial implementations. In some cases, vSAN has already been used in these organizations for years.

Why do so many organizations and entities choose vSAN?

Good question. vSAN is de facto storage virtualization software that, acting as part of HCI - in tandem with another Vmware product, such as vSphere - allows you to easily manage all storage from one management center. It can even be said that vSAN is the first step to this hyper-converged IT infrastructure, about which we write so much. But what are the benefits of this particular product?

The ones most frequently indicated by customers are easy to guess. Simplicity in management means lower operating costs, including lower training effort to operate it, automation of operations and lower demand for specialized personnel. It is also valued for being a simple way to build your own private cloud, which in turn is a simple way to quickly build applications based on it - both for internal use and those aimed at customers.

vSAN also has specific benefits also after implementation. The easy-to-learn management panel allows you to solve potential problems more easily. The solution also provides a high level of security through defined levels of redundancy: Petya or similar malware is not able to cause real damage, and thus, even in the case of mass cyber- attack vsan companies should not have problems with downtime.

Vmware has not forgotten about performance or scalability.

Solutions based on vSAN reach up to 150,000 IOPS (output operations per second) per node and can function even in the configuration of 64 nodes per cluster. So you can use relatively cheap servers and achieve the performance of enterprise-class solutions. This allows for flexible and quick implementation - for example, for companies that have a large number of small offices scattered in different places.

vSAN therefore helps customers reduce their total cost of ownership, increasing savings in capital and operating expenses. The software uses available hardware resources, connecting all memories connected even to x86 servers. Therefore, clients can start with modest investments, successively adding more memory and network nodes to clusters as the demand for storage space or performance increases. And let's not forget about process automation and simplification of service. It is not surprising then that the vSAN story is a success story - both for VMware and its clients.

What to base HCI on? Companies that have implemented it have their favorite