One of the more anticipated announcements solution providers were waiting on coming out of the VMware Partner Exchange conference was the the general availability of VMware Virtual SAN or VSAN.
VSAN is VMware’s first Software-Defined Storage product and a big piece of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor software-defined enterprise strategy for the channel.
Today, VMware officially launched the product to the channel. The VSAN is built directly into the VMware vSphere kernel and is a a new tier of hypervisor-converged storage. How it works is the software abstracts and pools internal magnetic disks and flash devices from industry-standard x86 servers to produce a shared data store for virtual machines.
Eric Gales, the country manager of VMware Canada, told CDN, in a previous interview, the channel partners have generally acknowledged of the opportunity with VSAN, while organizations are currently working on resolving how to best prepare for VSAN.
“What it means to the business is that it has huge potential and we want to distribute that to partners. Partners have made some strides in the past and some partners are already in the system. It’ll go slowly because they have to invest. We represent the journey to the software-defined enterprise and you start with virtualization. We are (also) learning from the partner ecosystem to represent them in this journey,” Gales said.
Meanwhile, VMware Canada channel chief Donna Wittmann, said the new Elite channel program will provide an opportunity to engage early with VSAN. “We are on the ground floor with VSAN and the same goes for NSX. These are early days and great opportunity for partners to be on the bleeding edge of the technology,” she said in a previous interview.
According to the company, VSAN storage provisioning and management attempts to reduce total cost of ownership and is suited for several use cases in virtual environments such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), test/development, and disaster recovery. VSAN’s new features include:
- Storage Policy Based Management: VSAN shifts the management model for storage from the device to the application. A single VSAN data store can provide differentiated service levels based on individual VM policies.
- Integration with the VMware stack: VSAN can be configured and deployed in two clicks using VMware vSphere Web Client.
VSAN is priced at $2,495 per processor. Virtual SAN for Desktop is priced at $50 per user. There is a special offer available where VMware will bundle VSAN with VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced for $2,875 per processor. And, VMware is also offering a vSphere Storage Appliance upgrade to VSAN at 20 per cent off the list price.