November 20168 IN MY VIEWF or those of us who work in, manage and serve the data cen-ter, `storage' has become an exciting topic in a way it wasn't for some 40 years. Over those four de-cades, innovation in storage slowed to a crawl as the large storage ven-dors continued to sell the same hard-ware year after year, with only slight improvements and contractual obli-gations that enforced strict and cost-ly vendor lock-in. It was a profitable business for vendors, but not a terribly interesting or valuable progression for enterprises.Fast forward to 2015 and innova-tion is exploding in the data center, matched only by the unstoppable growth of data itself. Leading the charge over the past few years are technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing, and software-de-fined storage (SDS). SDS as a tech-nology has in and of itself changed the fabric of enterprise storage ush-ering in a new generation of storage vendors, ready to challenge standard practice of legacy storage providers. With these new vendors, came innovation geared to radically trans-form the data center from big-box warehouses to high-performing, pol-icy-driven services. Storage is in-creasingly defined by software rather than by the capabilities and limita-tions of the hardware. Virtualization software such as Citrix XenServer, VMware vSphere, and Microsoft Hy-per-V leverage available storage in a more nimble, agile and efficient way.VMware planted a stake in the software-defined storage market with the introduction of VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN), providing a new tier of hypervisor-converged storage. VSAN is based on a highly available architecture with no single point of failure. It can withstand failures at the disk, server, and network level with no data loss, thanks to built-in redundancy mechanisms that trans-parently store multiple copies of the data across disks and hosts. This is vital in an environment transition-ing workloads to a fully virtualized infrastructure. As a policy-based approach to storage management, VSAN allows IT administrators to specify storage attributes­such as capacity, perfor-mance, and availability­in the form of simple policies associated with virtual data stores. Each data store maintains a unique storage policy, and VSAN dynamically self-tunes and load balances to meet the pol-icies of each group of VMs loaded on the data stores, adapting to on-going workload condition changes as needed.VMware VSAN offers enterprises key benefits when implemented How to Get More from Your VMware VSAN Cloud-Based StorageHeadquartered in Santa Clara, United States, Nexenta Systems is the global leader in Software-Defined Storage, delivering easy-to-use, secure and ultra-low cost storage software solutions. Founded in 2005, the company has more than 400 partners, 42 patents, and over 1,500 petabytes of storage under management.By Michael Letschin, Field CTO, Nexenta SystemsMichael Letschin
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