Scott Davis (Infinio) No 2 Storage Prediction for 2016.

Scott’s second prediction for 2016, relates to the emergence of the more customizable VSAN-based solution as opposed to the “pre-packaged-off-the-shelf” Hyper converged architectures.

VSAN becomes an Alternative to HCI.

Hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) is a sales strategy wrapped around a software-defined storage architecture that has garnered much attention in the past few years. HCI offerings comprise integrated hardware and software “building blocks” bundled and sold together as a single entity. The hardware is typically a server with direct attached storage disks and PCI-e flash cards. All the software needed to run virtual workloads is packaged as well, including hypervisor, systems management, configuration tools and virtual networking. Perhaps most relevant to our part of the industry, there is always a software-defined storage (SDS) stack bundled with HCI offerings that virtualizes the disks and flash hardware into a virtual storage array while providing storage management capabilities. This SDS stack delivers all the storage services to the virtual machines. In VMware’s EVO:Rail offering, VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) is this integrated storage stack. Now battle-tested and rich with enterprise features, VSAN will become more prevalent in the datacenter. Organizations attracted to cost-effective, high-performance server-side software-defined storage solutions no longer have to embrace the one-size-fits-all hyper converged infrastructure sales strategy along with it. They will increasingly choose the more customizable VSAN-based solutions, rather than pre-packaged HCI offerings, particularly for sophisticated enterprise data center use cases.

Scott Davis (Infinio) No 2 Storage Prediction for 2016.

VSAN becomes an Alternative to HCI.

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