vSAN across Industries
For the technical specialists responsible for IT environments, the thought of introducing a new solution in an environment can be equal parts exciting, and daunting. Enthusiastic levels of anticipation can come from the possibility that a new solution will offer the ability to achieve better results or do so more efficiently. Whether it be scalability, ease of use, performance, or the ability to accommodate unforeseen changes in the business, these characteristics are often how success is measured. When a new solution can benefit an environment in ways that are not anticipated, IT departments, as well as the consumers of the services, reap the rewards together.
But it is not without risk. Learning of previously unknown caveats of a solution during or after deployment can be disheartening. Perhaps ongoing operational costs are not what was anticipated, or maybe it doesn't meet some predetermined set of expectations. The burden is on IT to accommodate and deliver within the boundaries of the initial proposal. The line separating success and failure can be difficult to identify and navigate.
VMware didn't design vSAN for any single specific industry or use case. Foundational products like vSAN and vSphere must do many things well. They must be flexible and adapt to the changing needs of the business, and the applications that are used. Foundational products must provide features and capabilities that are appropriate for one type of environment, but not the other. Ensuring the same foundation can run in the cloud, and provide cloud-native services just as it does on-premises is also quickly becoming a requirement for many IT departments who seek operational continuity and flexibility in their environment.
Eight years and over 30,000 customers later, vSAN has demonstrated its flexibility across all different industries and use cases. Since it is a part of the hypervisor, this software-only approach gives our customers the flexibility needed to provide storage with the software they already know. Whether it be on-premises or in the cloud, its adoption across environments large and small is obvious.
Success aside, we still get asked if vSAN will work for a given industry. The short answer is "Yes, it will!" To help answer this question with a little more detail, we've introduced some new content recently to VMware's Cloud Platform Tech Zone that showcases some of this flexibility across industries. They can be found under the "Use Cases and Industries" section for vSAN. This new material includes vSAN in Industrial Environments, vSAN Powering Biotech, and most recently, vSAN in Healthcare. This is not an exhaustive list of all potential industries but is a good introduction in the flexibility of vSAN.
This new content gives practical examples of how the flexibility of vSAN's architecture can be used to adapt to the specific needs of the industry. They also include some general deployment recommendations that will help your efforts in understanding how vSAN could play a successful role in your environment. This material augments some of the great reference architectures we have with vSAN that help validate the functionality of specific applications using vSAN, or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) powered by vSAN.
Foundational products like vSAN bring new possibilities to environments of all types and can set up your organization for success for the challenges of today, tomorrow, and beyond. What are you waiting for?
- @vmpete