Announces new Virtual SAN customers, shows rapid Adoption of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) for mainstream enterprise storage
VMware has announced that Amway, iGov Technologies and SugarCreek have implemented VMware Virtual SAN, the leading hyper-converged solution with more than 5,000 customers. Year over year, the VMware Virtual SAN customer base has grown 200 percent.
As per the release, Amway, iGov and SugarCreek are running VMware Virtual SAN in support of enterprise business critical applications and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). These customers are taking advantage of the cloud-like flexibility and simplicity of Virtual SAN deployed in a hyper-converged form factor that minimizes both capital and operational expenses. VMware Virtual SAN provides shared storage for virtualized production environments with a simple scale-out model that leverages server hardware from every major server provider to deliver lower total cost of ownership than any enterprise storage solution.
A recent survey of the Virtual SAN customer base found that 64 percent of respondents are now running business critical applications. That figure spikes to 81 percent for customers running all-flash systems. According to Gartner, hyper-converged integrated systems (HCISs) market is forecast to grow from $371.5 million in 2014 to nearly $5 billion by 2019, which represents a 68 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).
Amway doubles workload performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional storage. “For a long time we have been wanting to virtualize our legacy business systems but limited SAN capacity and high costs of scaling fiber channel storage slowed the execution,” said Jason Montgomery, senior systems engineer, Amway. “Virtual SAN finally allowed us to virtualize quickly, and with a significant cost savings.”
iGov Technologies delivers smaller, lighter tactical computing solution. Mike Tyrrell, iGov’s COO and President said, “iGov took a hyper-converged infrastructure approach using VMware Virtual SAN with server-side storage subsequently reducing the weight by 75 percent, improving storage performance by 10x and extending battery run time by 7x. We expect to move quickly into operational testing and should begin fielding by the end of this year.”
Michael Noone, senior system administrator, SugarCreek said, “VMware Virtual SAN’s interoperability with automation and management tools I’m already familiar with was a key selling point. VMware Virtual SAN works with VMware vSphere PowerCLI and VMware vCenter Server which makes management simpler. We’re not a large IT shop and anything that we can do to cut down on time to dig through things or eliminate the need to log in to a different screen makes our lives easier and helps the business run better.”
Lee Caswell, vice president of Products, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware said, “We find Virtual SAN is following precisely the same adoption pattern of the early days of ESXi. Customers who originally bought into the exciting consolidation benefits of hyper-convergence are quickly expanding their use cases to business-critical applications now that enterprise storage features are fully supported and flash performance is available.”
