VMware says it will offer primary storage object integration with MinIO and added NetApp Storage Grid as another secondary store for its MSP customers.
The two announcements were made at the VMware Explore Barcelona bash.
NetApp announced StorageGRID for VMware Sovereign Cloud using a plugin for VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension. This enables sovereign cloud customers to store, secure, protect, and preserve unstructured data while meeting global data privacy and residency regulations. The integration delivers StorageGRID services within the familiar VMware Cloud Director user interface.
MinIO announced a technical preview to deliver object storage on VMware Cloud Foundation by integrating with VMware Data Services Manager. This will combine VMware Cloud Foundation’s infrastructure and the MinIO Object Store to deliver an integrated experience for mission-critical workloads running on VMware Cloud Foundation. Data Services Manager is a native extension of vSphere to provide data services on-premises to customers to, for example, application line of business teams. The integrated VMware-MinIO software will support any storage, including vSAN, and any DVS, DHCP or static IP pools.
NetApp is integrating with the VMware ecosystem via VMware Cloud Director while MinIO is doing so through the VMware Cloud Foundation.
VMware Cloud Director (VCD) is a way of making VMware services available through managed service providers. VCD is aimed at delivering secure, isolated, and elastic virtual datacenter compute, network, storage, and security facilities in a self-service model. It has its own ecosystem of third-party suppliers, such as Dell Data Protection and Veeam for backup, Palo Alto for security, and Cloudian, Dell ECS, Scality RING and Amazon S3 for storage; all four object storage suppliers. They are now being joined by NetApp with its StorageGRID product.
Phil Brotherton, VP, Solutions & Alliances at NetApp, said in a statement: “The integration of NetApp StorageGRID with VMware Sovereign Cloud is a significant achievement for NetApp and a real game changer for our customers with unstructured data in the cloud who must maintain sovereign control of that data at all times.”
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is a multi-public cloud software platform that provides a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) using components like vSphere (compute), vSAN (storage), NSX (networking), and some parts of the Aria Suite (formerly vRealize Suite). It includes Tanzu, meaning containers can run alongside virtual machines.
VMware Data Services Manager offers a data-as-a-service toolkit for on-demand provisioning and automated management of Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, and MySQL databases in vSphere environments. MinIO says it is the first 3rd party object store to be natively integrated with VMware Data Services Manager.
Ugur Tigli, MinIO CTO, said of this: “The ability to seamlessly support both virtual machines and Kubernetes provides much needed flexibility for enterprises to modernize their infrastructure over time. This combined solution is further evidence of the importance object storage holds in the modern enterprise.” MinIO says IT admins can manage multiple data services such as relational databases and its object store with a consistent operating model and benefit from VMware vSAN’s enterprise storage features.
Vijay Ramachandran, VP of product management, Storage and Data Infrastructure for VMware, said in his statement: “VMware’s strategy is to make advanced data services such as the MinIO Object Store as easy to consume for customers as we did for compute, networking and storage. Customers and community members globally use MinIO every day to deliver better security, resiliency, durability and operational excellence across their deployments. Now together with MinIO, we are bringing this capability to VMware Cloud Foundation as a natively integrated data service.”
For more about MinIO and VMware’s Data Services Manager, click here, or email hello@min.io to get into the early access program.
Bootnote
The latest releases of NetApp ONTAP and ONTAP Tools for vSphere make provisioning, protecting, and securing VMware environments at a large scale significantly faster and easier, we’re told. There is a redefined architecture with VMware vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) integration simplifying policy-driven operations and cloud-like scale. An API approach enables an automation-enabled framework for IT teams to integrate with existing tooling and build end-to-end workflows.
