vmware, lenovo, and intel solve data storage challenges · the solution from vmware, lenovo and...
TRANSCRIPT
The ever-growing adoption of virtualization and cloud computing is driving the demand for high-
performance storage. Existing storage arrays struggle to keep pace within limited IT budgets. IT
organizations facing this challenge are looking for ways to manage their ever-growing demands
on data storage.
The industry is addressing these challenges with new solutions designed to help enterprises meet
their growing data storage needs without breaking the bank. Technology offerings such as soft-
ware-defined storage (SDS) are transforming the way organizations handle their data storage needs.
One such solution comes via a partnership of VMware, Lenovo and Intel, with the companies
offering an efficient, cost-saving, high-performance software-defined storage solution for virtual
environments. CIOs and other technology decision-makers need to educate themselves about the
latest storage technologies and how they can help meet current and future demands.
Data Storage: A Huge and Growing Challenge
Effective data storage is clearly one of the top priorities of corporate IT management today.
According to the “2014 InfoWorld Navigating IT: Objectives and Obstacles” study, about two-thirds
of the 421 IT decision-makers surveyed (67 percent) rated storage solutions and services as being
critical or very important IT investments. That’s up significantly from the 42 percent of respondents
who gave this response in the 2013 survey.
However, deploying and managing storage environments means dealing with many challenges.
One of the biggest is the rapid rise in storage demand and the growing complexity of storage
environments within organizations. Data storage requirements have increased exponentially over
the years, because of the I/O loads and performance demands placed on storage devices and the
sheer volume of data that needs to be stored.
Software-Defined Storage Can Solve Your Data Storage Challenges
2 Software-Defined Storage Can Solve Your Data Storage Challenges
The need to store growing amounts of data has led companies
to deploy multiple storage systems, resulting in complex storage
infrastructures that can be difficult to manage. Complexity not only
creates time-consuming management challenges for organizations
but can also lead to costly overprovisioning of storage resources.
Another key challenge is the need to maintain high performance
and meet service-level agreements (SLAs) in the face of this rising
demand for storage and virtualized applications. Users such as
employees, customers and business partners expect a consis-
tent level of service, including the continuous availability of data
storage resources. There is much less tolerance for downtime or
poor service quality, and given the importance of information in
today’s economy, IT departments that fail to meet SLAs may be
putting business operations in jeopardy.
External storage-area networks (SANs) and NAS arrays continue
to be the default approach for storage needs in the data center.
NAS systems can entail issues such as performance limitations,
lengthy provisioning cycles, inflexibility in the face of change, lack
of granular control and difficult troubleshooting. Legacy storage
systems also present a storage bottleneck for the growth of
virtualization, can be difficult to scale efficiently and often lack the
flexibility and agility companies need in today’s rapidly changing
business environment. Over- or underprovisioning traditional hard
disk drives is a common problem in data storage management.
The rising costs of storage, including hardware, software,
personnel and facilities, are another challenge for organizations.
Shared storage via SAN and NAS arrays has improved with solid-
state drives (SSDs), but the growth in SANs and NAS systems has
now become part of the rising cost of data storage.
Unless an organization relies on direct-attached SSDs and cloud-
based storage, the expense of building a network-based storage
infrastructure will continue to rise. Costs are especially an issue with
proprietary storage solutions. The increased costs of storage come
at a time when many companies continue to face tight IT budgets.
New Solutions Meet Current and Future Needs
New storage technology is emerging to help companies address
these and other storage challenges. The availability of virtualiza-
tion, cloud services and SDS is transforming the way organizations
provide and manage data storage.
The solution from VMware, Lenovo and Intel includes VMware
Virtual SAN on Lenovo’s System x servers (recently purchased from
IBM), powered by Intel® Xeon® processors and Intel SSDs. Virtual
SAN abstracts and pools the disks inside a System x server to
create a resilient, scalable and high-performance shared data store.
Virtual SAN provides a new tier of SDS delivered directly from the
hypervisor and optimized for virtual machines (VMs). The solution is
designed to simplify storage and free enterprise data centers from
the storage bottlenecks and cost of traditional SAN and NAS. System
x delivers the reliability, scalability and balanced performance that
organizations need in their storage infrastructures today.
There are two options for deploying Virtual SAN: use a Virtual SAN
Ready Node or build your own system with Virtual SAN–certified
components available from Lenovo. The Ready Node approach
enables companies to accelerate Virtual SAN deployment by using
a recommended server configuration from Lenovo that is best
suited to certain types of workloads. Customers can start with a
validated starting point and order the Ready Nodes as is or further
customize them to meet their particular needs.
This offering from the three technology partners gives data centers
with VMware vSphere environments the best high-performance,
reliable storage solution with highly granular scalability and radically
simple, policy-based VM management. With the solution, organiza-
tions can quickly deploy storage that continually meets each VM’s
SLA and automatically adapts storage to application requirements.
SDS enables an application-centric approach based on a common
policy-based control plane. Storage requirements are captured for
each VM in simple policies that follow the VM through its lifecycle
on any infrastructure. This policy-based management frame-
work allows for seamless automation and orchestration, with the
Virtual SAN software dynamically making adjustments to under-
lying storage pools to ensure that application-driven policies are
compliant and SLAs are being met.
Data storage requirements have increased exponentially over the years, because of the I/O loads and performance demands placed on storage devices and the sheer volume of data that needs to be stored.
3 Software-Defined Storage Can Solve Your Data Storage Challenges
The enterprise-class SDS solution from VMware, Lenovo and Intel
provides several potential benefits for organizations:
n It is easy to install, use and reconfigure as needed and can
be integrated into the VMware software stack.
n It is managed through a storage-policy-based
management framework.
n Its granular and linear scaling means there’s no need for
complex forecasting and no threat of overprovisioning.
n It provides high performance through flash acceleration
and SSD persistence.
n Its total cost of ownership is lower than that of alternative
solutions, because of its server-side economics and ease of
use and because it doesn’t require large upfront investments.
n Its software and hardware components‘ high resistance to
failures is valuable for always-on IT environments.
The solution supports several use cases. One is for virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI), in which the solution can handle peak perfor-
mance requirements (boot, log-in, read/write storms), support high
VDI density and easily scale from proof of concept to production
without large upfront investments. The adoption of Virtual SAN
enables organizations to support higher VDI density and improved
end user experience and productivity.
Another use case is disaster recovery (DR). The Virtual SAN on
System x solution can be integrated with VMware vSphere
Replication and VMware Site Recovery Manager to support a
cost-effective DR strategy.
The solution is also ideal for staging and testing/development,
because it provides rapid storage provisioning and complete auto-
mation, reduces the cost of storage for noncritical workloads and
enables cloud architects to easily provision storage.
Major enhancements included in the recent Virtual SAN 6.0 release
provide enterprise-class scale and performance as well as new
capabilities that broaden the applicability of the technology to
business-critical application workloads. Built on highly reliable
System x servers with distributed RAID architecture, predictive
failure analysis, light path diagnostics and thermal design, the
solution can support any business-critical or tier-1 production
application workloads.
Summary: Opportunities for Big Gains
Yes, these are challenging times for IT organizations grappling with
overwhelming demands for data storage. But that doesn’t mean
they have to despair. In fact, this is an opportunity to make enter-
prise data storage more efficient and cost-effective than ever.
SDS creates a fundamentally new approach that takes away
unnecessary complexity and delivers many of the same benefits
companies are seeing from software-defined data centers,
including high performance, greater simplicity and reduced costs.
The solution from VMware, Lenovo and Intel not only lever-
ages SDS but also features several hardware strengths. System
x servers are known for their reliability and uptime. Intel SSDs
deliver consistent performance, end-to-end data protection and
high reliability for enterprise storage. The hardware is also highly
scalable—a critical issue for fast-growing companies or organiza-
tions with rapidly shifting demands for capacity—and it offers
performance balanced between compute, storage and network
components. Another benefit is that the total cost of ownership of
this solution is lower than that of external storage.
Solutions such as this are delivering a radically simple storage
alternative and providing a policy-based framework for easy
management. This enables administrators to provision and
manage storage without having specialized storage skills.
This type of solution gives organizations a high-performance
platform that is scalable to meet future growth in demand and a
storage infrastructure that enables them to reduce the total cost of
ownership of storage by as much as 50 percent.
IT and storage managers need to explore the latest technologies
available on the market and take the lead in ensuring that their
organizations are doing all they can to deliver the most-efficient
high-performance data storage.
Data centers with VMware vSphere environments offer the best high-performance, reliable storage solution with highly granular scalability and radically simple, policy-based VM management.
More information: www.vmware.com/partners/global-alliances/ lenovo/lenovo-storage.html
Sign up for a 60-day free evaluation of Virtual SAN at www.vmware.com/go/try-vsan-en