This week at VMworld 2015, we announced Virtual SAN 6.1, the third-generation of VMware’s hyper-converged infrastructure for VMs. With this release, we are introducing several major enhancements and new capabilities, including support for the latest generation of storage devices, new availability and disaster recovery features, and advanced management and serviceability tools. These capabilities build on […]

From the early days of VMware, it became clear that dealing with storage in efficient and scalable ways were key requirements for the success of virtualization in enterprise environments. Indeed, the storage stack of ESXi, including VMFS, played a key role in the proliferation of virtualization in data centers, where data is stored and managed […]

  Historical Parallels 2014 marked the centennial of the beginning of the First World War (WWI): an event that had a terrible human cost and paved the way to major political and social changes across the globe. The centennial steered a wave of retrospection around the events and causes that led to WWI  (ref. The […]

A year ago I predicted that 2013 will be the time when Software-Defined Storage (SDS) will take off, with credible products either being released for the first time or reaching a maturity level that can be taken seriously as an alternative to traditional storage. Hype aside, SDS does reflect a major shift in how storage […]

2012 has been the year of “software-defined datacenter“. Another buzzword? Perhaps, but nevertheless it captures a tectonic shift happening in the IT industry. As a colleague, William Earl, commented in a blog post earlier this year, the increasing power of low-cost servers is making it possible to replace specialized hardware with general-purpose servers plus software. […]

VMware shared a technology preview of Distributed Storage at VMworld 2012 as part of our broader storage strategy. Steve Herrod described this technology as “virtual SAN” in his Day 1 keynote at VMworld. Distributed Storage (DS), currently under development by VMware engineers, is a distributed layer of software running natively as part of the ESX […]