Accommodating for change with Virtual SAN

One of the many challenges to proper data center design is trying to accommodate for future changes, and do so in a practical way. Growth is often the reason behind change, and while that is inherently a good thing, IT budgets often don’t see that same rate of increase. CFO’s expect economies of scale to make your environment more cost efficient, and so should you.

Unfortunately, applications are always demanding more resources. The combination of commodity x86 servers and virtualization provided a flexible way to accommodate growth when it came to compute and memory resources, but addressing storage capacity and storage performance was far more difficult. Hyper-converged architectures helped break down this barrier somewhat, but some solutions lacked flexibility to cope with increasing storage capacity or performance beyond the initial prescribed configurations defined by a vendor. Users need a way to easily increase their HCI storage resources in the middle of a lifecycle without always requesting for yet another capital expenditure.

“A customer can have a car painted any color he wants as long as it’s black” — Henry Ford

But wait… it doesn’t always have to be that way. Take a look at my post on Virtual Blocks on Options in scalability with Virtual SAN. See how VSAN allows for a smarter way to approach your evolving resource needs, giving the power of choice in how you scale your environment back to you. Whether you choose to build your own servers using the VMware compatibility guide, go with VSAN Ready Nodes, or select from one of the VxRAIL options available, the principals described in the post remain the same. I hope it sparks a few ideas on how you can apply this flexibility in a strategic way to your own environment.

Thanks for reading…