6 vSAN Success Factors

When planning a new vSAN infrastructure or upgrading or extending an existing environment, many organisations favour vSAN, VMware’s software-defined storage (SDS) solution for hyper-converged infrastructures.

It is not unusual to assume that vSAN’s capabilities render hardware a matter of secondary importance. This is a serious mistake: the performance, scalability and security of your vSAN fabric depend heavily on the capability of the hardware on which it runs.

Through hundreds of successful engagements with customers of various types across multiple sectors, MTI’s vSAN specialists have identified six issues which require serious consideration before any hardware decisions are taken.

These success factors are key to every vSAN project. We work closely with you to fully explore and understand them, building our proposals in light of our findings.

In this article we will look briefly at each of them and then outline why we recommend Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes – VMware’s SDS running on Dell’s proven and highly popular PowerEdge servers  – to address them. We will explore the six success factors first.

  • 1) Project Risk

    Any project involving systems integration entails a degree of risk. The greater the degree of previously untested integration required, the greater the risk of delay, additional costs or even complete project failure.

  • 2) Storage Efficiency

    Optimal return on vSAN investment demands high CAPEX and OPEX efficiency across all storage systems.

  • 3) Scalability

    The ability to scale your storage operations rapidly, simply and seamlessly is an essential prerequisite for the responsive IT services necessary to compete in the digital economy.

  • 4) Manageability

    Management complexity drives costs up, reduces productivity, increases risk and wastes time

  • 5) Performance

    Your vSAN environment demands a high-performance network architecture, providing high bandwidth to support the low latencies offered by all-flash storage nodes.

  • 6) Security

    Establishing and maintaining security is a complex, multi-faceted and constantly shifting challenge. Across your vSAN, you need to consider security at the server level and more broadly. On-server encryption, broader encryption extending into virtual machines, and Key Management solutions are examples of the spread of technologies to consider.

Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes

Dell EMC and VMware have collaborated on vSAN for over four years, putting Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes through thousands of hours of testing. The result is a family of jointly validated vSAN deployment acceleration solutions.

This joint testing and certification cuts vSAN project risks considerably and makes your vSAN predictable and easy to design, build and manage. You also benefit from a single, trusted source for your entire solution, installed, implemented and supported, around the world, by MTI and Dell EMC.

Efficient and Scalable

Server-side economics, affordable flash storage and grow-as-you-go scaling improve storage efficiency, cutting CAPEX, while simplified deployment and management enable reductions in OPEX.

A wide variety of factory-installed, pre-configured and pre-tested configurations are available, easing deployment for diverse needs. Faster configuration, fewer update steps, and simpler maintenance, troubleshooting and resolution make for rapid, easy scaling.

Powerful and Secure

Based on Dell’s proven and widely trusted PowerEdge Servers, vSAN Ready Nodes feature powerful processors, high core counts, maximum memory densities, wide I/O pipes, substantial fast all-flash internal storage, and encryption allowing data-at-rest security to be enabled quickly and easily.  They are ideal building blocks for your high-performance vSAN fabric.

Don’t dive into vSAN without working through these six key success factors. Choose a partner you can trust to help you work through them, identifying issues, then proposing and delivering reliable infrastructure in easy to purchase, simple to deploy building blocks that deliver the performance, scalability and security you need, today and tomorrow.

With extensive security experience and in-house expertise, MTI can advise on all aspects of data security and protection, helping identify which techniques and technologies will deliver the benefits your organisation needs, and the optimal architecture for your vSAN requirements.

DellEMC’s new PowerEdge™ Modular Server Infrastructure is a great example of the kind of advancements available with modern server infrastructure – If you are interested in seeing these systems in real life, we are running a few Demo events to help give IT professionals access to the latest DellEMC systems. Book by clicking the link on the image to the right or down below.

Find out more about Dell’s new, modular EMC PowerEdge MX solutions today.

Book a demonstration of the technology and its capabilities here