Empowering vSAN for Enterprise Storage

Featured article by Stefan Bernbo, founder and CEO, Compuverde

Experts estimate that at least 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day. That’s an astronomical amount of data to be stored. One study revealed that managing storage growth is the dominant pain point for 79 percent of IT professionals. To help remedy this situation, VMware released its virtual SAN in March of 2014. Almost three years after its introduction, where is it now?

The reason that organizations have been enthusiastic about this solution is that it enables users to use storage within ESXi servers without the need for external storage. vSAN promises to deliver fast, resilient scale-out storage.

Server admins were looking forward to using vSAN because it gave them a symmetrical architecture that did not require external storage, thus being able to use storage within existing servers. It also doesn’t require specialized storage skills. However, no one solution can be all things to all enterprises, and as enterprises began to deploy vSAN across their environments, they noticed something significant was missing.

How vNAS Fills in the Gaps

It is true that vSAN offers many benefits to organizations trying to get a handle on their storage needs. However, what vSAN lacks is support for a file system. To call this a significant problem is an understatement.

Without a file system, the guest VMs cannot share files between them, and are forced to use an external NAS solution as shared storage. Without a file system overlaying this data, it becomes impossible to scale efficiently.

In addition, today’s organizations need support for hypervisors due to the explosion of virtual environments. Therefore, a scale-out vNAS needs to be able to run as a hyper-converged set-up. As a result, a software-defined infrastructure strategy makes sense here.

Because vNAS works without external storage, it must be able to run as a virtual machine and make use of the hypervisor host’s physical resources. The guest virtual machine’s (VM) own images and data will be stored in the virtual file system that the vNAS provides. The guest VMs can use this file system to share files between them, making it perfect for VDI environments as well.

Flexibility and scalability are hallmarks of a vNAS storage solution. It is able to offer these benefits because it is software-defined, supports both fast and energy-efficient hardware and supports bare-metal as well as virtual environments.

Protocols play an important role in storage architecture as well. vSAN uses a block protocol within the cluster, but when designing storage architecture, it is important to support many protocols. Why? In a virtual environment, there are many different applications running, having different protocol needs. By supporting many protocols, the architecture is kept flat, with the ability to share data between applications that speak different protocols, to some extent.

File Sharing in the Hybrid Cloud

Enterprises today are distributed across many locations. Each site office has its own independent file system. It is probable that different offices have a need for both a private area and an area that they share with other branches. So only parts of the file system will be shared with others. This common scenario, so essential to the functioning of a typical business, cannot be achieved with a vSAN.

It’s becoming more commonplace for organizations to use a hybrid cloud set-up to store data both onsite and in the cloud. Being able to use just the amount of cloud storage required, depending on the group’s needs, delivers excellent gains in performance and flexibility. The challenge is that in vSAN, there is no file system that can be extended to cover the data in the cloud, and files cannot be shared between the onsite location and the cloud.

This challenge is overcome with vNAS, though, because each site has its own independent file system. In a typical organization, different offices will need both a private area and an area that they share with other branches. As a result, only parts of the file system will be shared with others.

Dedicating a particular portion of a file system that others can mount at any given point in the other file systems delivers the flexibility needed to scale the file system beyond the office walls – ensuring that the synchronization is made at the file system level in order to have a consistent view of the file system across sites. Being able to specify different file encodings at different sites is useful, for example, if one site is used as a backup target.

Preparing for the Future of Storage

As the world’s consumers and computers churn out quintillions of data bytes each day, enterprises are racing to find scale-out solutions to meet mushrooming storage demands without breaking the budget. vSAN is a great start with its easy set-up and its speed, but it needs file system support to work best in the enterprise. vNAS becomes vSAN’s partner by providing that support. It’s a one-two storage punch that positions organizations to scale quickly both now and in the future.

About the Author

Stefan Bernbo is the founder and CEO of Compuverde. For 20 years, Stefan has designed and built numerous enterprise scale data storage solutions designed to be cost effective for storing huge data sets. From 2004 to 2010 Stefan worked within this field for Storegate, the wide-reaching Internet based storage solution for consumer and business markets, with the highest possible availability and scalability requirements. Previously, Stefan has worked with system and software architecture on several projects with Swedish giant Ericsson, the world-leading provider of telecommunications equipment and services to mobile and fixed network operators.