VMware has lined up plenty of industry support for its Virtual SAN (VSAN) software-defined storage platform. Only one company offers a full line of certified enterprise hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs), claims HGST.
VSAN, the EMC’s subsidiary’s first software-defined storage product, officially arrived in March after a six-month beta program. The storage software boasts seamless integration with VMware vSphere, allowing the company’s customers to extend storage virtualization capabilities to their virtualized server environments.
VMware VSAN allows administrators to “manage storage from the virtual machine without focusing on the application and without having to care about the underlying infrastructure,” Alberto Farronato, VMware’s director of Storage and Availability Product Marketing, told InfoStor at the time.
Western Digital’s HGST division is taking care of the capacity part of the equation.
HGST today announced that is enterprise SAS HDDS, SSDs and PCIe drives have been certified for the VSAN platform. Specifically, the company’s Ultrastar C10K1200, s1122 PCIe Accelerator, S842 SAS SSDs and FlashMAX have been given the official nod. Offering a glimpse into the five-step certification process, HGST claims that VMware’s evaluation includes a look into a product’s overall integrity, performance, and of course, reliability.
“The future of the data center lies in making data and storage more accessible and faster across all infrastructure environments,” said Mike Gustafson, senior vice president and general manager of HGST’s Flash Platforms Group noted in a statement. His company has earned the distinction of having “the only complete certified, storage device portfolio that allows customers large and small to leverage the advanced technology and performance tiers of VMware Virtual SAN,” he added.
Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group, said in prepared remarks that VMware’s seal of approval is “a win for HGST” and VSAN customers. “The performance gains a customer can attain are massive.”
Since its reveal, VSAN has been steadily gaining support from several industry players, including Dell, IBM and Cisco.
In August, Nextenta, Santa Clara, Calif.-based storage software specialist, announced NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN, software that extends NFS (NFSv3 and NFSv4) and SMB file services to the platform. The add-on offers inline compression and deduplication and IO path handling, which the company claims improves VSAN input/output (IO) performance by up to 10x.