VMware ecosystem expands

At the VMware Partner Exchange 2014, VMware announced a broad partner ecosystem support for VMware Virtual SAN, VMware’s first Software-Defined Storage product.

Currently available in public beta, VMware Virtual SAN will be certified with hardware servers and devices from Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fusion-io, HGST, a Western Digital company, HP, IBM, Intel, LSI, Samsung Electronics, SanDisk and Seagate at general availability providing customers with a wide range of options on which to run VMware Virtual SAN. VMware Virtual SAN is expected to be generally available in Q1 2014.

‚”VMware Virtual SAN has received an enthusiastic response from the VMware community during its public beta easily one of the most successful public beta programs at VMware to date with more than 10,000 registered participants,‚” said John Gilmartin, vice president and general manager, SDDC Suite Business Unit, VMware. ‚”That enthusiasm extends to the broad support from our hardware and storage partner ecosystem. Their commitment to certifying their hardware and storage devices with VMware Virtual SAN will offer our joint customers extensive choice and flexibility for jump-starting their software-defined storage initiatives.‚”

VMware Virtual SAN Delivering a New Tier of Storage

Unveiled at VMworld 2013 San Francisco, VMware Virtual SAN provides a new tier of hypervisor-converged storage. VMware Virtual SAN pools hardware resources provided by industry-standard x86 servers with internal magnetic disks and server-side flash to produce fast and resilient shared storage for virtual machines (VMs). VMware Virtual SAN simplifies storage administration due to its unique management approach based on VM-centric policies and built-in automation. A key building block of the VMware software-defined storage vision, VMware Virtual SAN enables the delivery of storage functionality as software built into the VMware vSphere kernel.

With VMware Virtual SAN, VMware will provide customers with two options for deployment: VMware Virtual SAN Ready Nodes, and a component-based hardware compatibility list. VMware Virtual SAN Ready Nodes will provide a set of pre-configured servers that can be used with VMware Virtual SAN to simplify configuration and procurement. The hardware compatibility list will feature supported Flash devices, Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), I/O controllers and Solid State Storage providing customers with the flexibility to select the servers and components that best suit their needs.

At general availability, it is expected that more than 150 components as well as 10 Ready Nodes will be certified with VMware Virtual SAN. Additional components are expected to be certified with VMware Virtual SAN over time.

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