Multi-Storage

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File & Block Storage from Vmware vSAN

VMware vSAN is the #1 Leading HCI vendor in the market. Flash-optimized, vSphere-native storage for private and public cloud.

Object Storage from NetApp StorageGRID

Object storage that enables management of your unstructured data across hybrid and multicloud environments

Features of vSAN

Tightly integrated with vSphere – vSAN is integrated with vSphere, optimizing the data I/O path to provide the highest levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

VM-centric policy-based management – vSAN is part of the larger VMware Cloud Foundation stack that uniquely delivers consistent, VM-centric operations through policy-based management. Using simple policies, common tasks are automated and storage resources are balanced to reduce management time and optimize HCI efficiency.

Unified management – vSAN natively integrates with the VMware Cloud Foundation stack, removing the need for training and operating specialized storage interfaces. vSAN uses a modern HTML5-based web client. VMware vRealize Operations™ within vCenter enables rapid visibility into a vSAN deployment with broad monitoring and deep analytics, all from vCenter.

Flash optimized – vSAN minimizes storage latency with built-in caching on serverside flash devices, delivering up to 50 percent more IOPS than previously possible. vSAN all-flash can be deployed for less than $1 per GB of usable capacity—more than 50 percent less than the cost of competing hybrid hyperconverged solutions.

Granular, nondisruptive scale-up or scale-out – Nondisruptively expand capacity and performance by adding hosts to a cluster (scale-out) or just grow capacity by adding disks to a host (scale-up).

Deduplication and compression – Software-based deduplication and compression optimizes all-flash storage capacity, providing as much as 7x data reduction with minimal CPU and memory overhead.

Erasure coding – Increase usable storage capacity by up to 100 percent while keeping data resiliency unchanged. It is capable of tolerating one or two failures with single parity or double parity protection.

vSAN Encryption – Native to vSAN, vSAN Encryption provides data-at-rest security at the cluster level and supports all vSAN features, including space efficiency features such as deduplication and compression. Enabled with a few clicks, vSAN Encryption is built for compliance requirements and offers simple key management with support for all KMIP compliant key managers, such as CloudLink, Hytrust, SafeNet, Thales and Vormetric. vSAN Encryption is FIPS 140-2 validated, meeting stringent U.S. federal government standards.

Stretched clusters with local protection – Create a robust stretched cluster with site and local protection between two geographically separate sites, synchronously replicating data between sites. It enables enterprise-level availability where an entire site failure can be tolerated as well as local component failures, with no data loss and near zero downtime. Users can set granular protection on a per-VM basis and nondisruptively change policies—all for 50 percent lower costs than the leading traditional solution.

Integrated file services – Easily provision a file share with a single workflow, and use vSAN as a unified storage control plane for both block and file storage. vSAN also supports file services for cloud native applications orchestrated by Kubernetes. vSAN supports NFS v4.1 and v3 storage protocols.

Quality of service (QoS) – Available in all editions of vSAN, QoS controls, limits and monitors the IOPS consumed by specific VMs, eliminating noisy neighbor issues.

VMware Skyline™ Health – This provides integrated hardware compatibility checks, performance monitoring, storage capacity reporting and diagnostics directly from VMware vCenter Server®.

iSCSI access – New to vSAN 6.7, vSAN can now support Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) technology, reducing data center silos by managing more business critical applications through a single HCI solution. vSAN storage can be presented as an iSCSI target for physical workloads. All core functionality continues to be available and managed through vCenter.

vSAN Support Insight – This helps keep vSAN running in an optimal state, saving monitoring and troubleshooting time, by providing real-time support notifications and actionable recommendations. The analytics tool can also optimize performance for certain scenarios with recommended settings.

Two-node direct connect – Save up to 20 percent per site by eliminating the need for any switches between servers in a two-node deployment. Use crossover cables to simply and reliably connect the servers directly.

Full-featured PowerCLI – vSAN provides the ease and scalability of enterprise-class automation with a set of full-featured PowerCLI cmdlets. New SDK and API updates enable more enterprise-class automation by supporting REST APIs.

Built-in failure tolerance and advanced availability – vSAN leverages distributed RAID and cache mirroring to ensure that data is never lost if a disk, host, network or rack fails. It seamlessly supports vSphere availability features, such as vSphere Fault Tolerance and vSphere High Availability. vSphere Replication™ for vSAN provides asynchronous VM replication with recovery point objectives (RPOs) of up to five minutes. New always-on features deliver a highly available management stack, independent of vCenter, and intelligent rebuilds accelerate recovery.

Cloud native storage – Containers require a modern storage infrastructure approach: Storage needs to be policy driven for scalability, portable across clouds to follow the container, and operationally consistent for efficiency. With cloud native storage, developers seamlessly consume storage. vSAN cloud native storage supports all key storage API objects within Kubernetes. With minimal effort, developers can choose a policy-driven storage class for their pods and automatically mount the volume. vSAN supports both block and file protocols, including NFS v4.1 and v3, powering both block-centric and file-centric microservice-based applications. vSAN has native services with six of the largest public cloud providers. As these environments leverage the same tools and processes as users’ private clouds, data migration is as simple as using vSphere Storage vMotion®, and Kubernetes can leverage your public cloud environment as your container-based workloads scale. vSAN provides admins with a unified management plane for both VM- and container-based workloads. With granular visibility into container volumes, admins can quickly and easily control and monitor health and compliance information per volume. Admins can also rapidly troubleshoot and remediate activities; this faster support helps DevOps teams implement container-based apps even faster.

Benefits of vSAN

Integrated with Your Hypervisor
Enjoy scalable, high-performance, and secure infrastructure with the only vSphere-integrated storage virtualization software.

Lower Costs
Achieve better price per performance by supporting the latest storage technology on industry-standard servers.

Power Traditional and Cloud-Native Applications
Manage both virtual machine (VM) and container applications seamlessly, and benefit from integration with leading container orchestrators such as Kubernetes.

Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Ready
Use HCI anywhere with the industry’s broadest ecosystem: 18 OEM server vendors and native services with leading public clouds including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.

Simplified Operations
Easily roll out new infrastructure and applications with minimal training.

Features of NetApp StorageGRID

Massive scalability and flexible infrastructure

• Massive elastic content store • Multiple geo-distributed sites • Support for multiple storage tiers: – SSD, SAS, SATA, tape – Amazon S3 – Microsoft Azure • Geo–erasure coding and geo-replication • Deployment on VMs, hardware appliances, or bare-metal servers with Docker containers

Application interfaces

Massively parallel transaction engine with: • Integrated load balancing • Transaction multithread pipelining Object access protocols: • Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift NAS access: • CIFS and NFS • File object duality System and account management: • Management API: system installation, system administration, tenant management, maintenance tasks, and system monitoring including Prometheus • Tenant API: management of users, credentials, usage, and quotas

Data services

Platform services – tenant configurable hybrid cloud integration: • S3 event notification with Amazon SNS • CloudMirror bucket replication with Amazon S3 or S3-compatible target • Metadata search and analysis with streaming metadata to external Elasticsearch WORM retention: • Reinforced data integrity with compliance-grade WORM • Litigation hold Advanced security and encryption capabilities: • Store objects with lossless compression • Transport Security Layer (TSL) 1.2 and AES 256-bit encryption • Secure Hash Algorithm 2 (SHA-2) and CPU-efficient integrity protection

Metadata and content awareness

Metadata-based data management: • Content-aware self-healing maintains data protection even during network disruptions • Policies can be modified and applied retroactively to existing objects

Deployment options

• Physical or virtual servers via Docker containers • Virtual appliance: – VMware ESXi and vCenter • Hardware appliances: – NetApp StorageGRID SGF6024 for high-performance primary object storage workloads, web apps, streaming – NetApp StorageGRID SG6060 for transactional small object storage workloads, including FabricPool optimization, with expansion shelf options for large scale capacity, including data lakes. – NetApp StorageGRID SG5712 and SG5760 for secondary, capacity object storage workloads – NetApp StorageGRID SG1000 services appliance for simplified operations include admin node software and load balancing

Service-level objective and performance monitoring

• Get comprehensive performance feeds: – Access throughout – Replication throughout – Time to policies achieved • Demonstrate SLAs • Leverage QoS rate limiting to manage workload performance • Measure transaction round-trip time • Isolate application, replication, and admin network traffic • Adjust data policies with flexible ILM • Advanced system monitoring via Prometheus • Separate WAN, storage, gateway times • Advanced system monitoring via Prometheus

Management and monitoring

• Centralized and automatable installation and expansions • Automated monitoring and tenant management through an API • Rolling upgrades without downtime • Comprehensive ad hoc real-time, rolling-period, and historical-usage query capability • 200+ predefined monitoring, usage, and performance reports • Event-based audit messages for performance tracing, usage monitoring, and enabling billing or chargeback

Professional Services

• Reduce deployment risk, streamline implementation, migrate quickly with minimal disruption – Discovery and design determines solution requirements – Validated process for appliance deployment and software configuration – Data migration with proven methodologies and reliable tools

Benefits of NetApp StorageGRID

Scale: Distribute Across Clouds
Take advantage of the public cloud to process, transform, and analyze objects and metadata while securing your data in an on-premises object store.

Simplify: Enable Global Data Governance
Enable seamless hybrid cloud experience by providing unified visibility, manageability and operations across on-premises environment and a vSphere based public cloud

Accelerate: Store Data Efficiently
Optimize data availability, performance, geo-distribution, retention, protection, and storage cost with metadata-driven policies, and adjust them dynamically as the business value of data evolves.