PARTNER CONTENT: As IT leaders move away from VMware, they face a critical decision: do they stick with traditional storage architectures, or is now the time to finally unlock the full potential of an infrastructure that converges virtualization, storage, and networking technologies?
Early convergence efforts centered on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), where storage ran as a virtual machine under the hypervisor, commonly called a vSAN. While adoption has lagged behind traditional three-tier architectures, recent advancements have significantly improved vSAN, making it worth reconsidering by addressing past shortcomings.
When vSANs were first introduced, they came with bold promises:
– Lower storage cost utilizing server hardware: By eliminating the need for expensive proprietary storage arrays, vSAN aimed to reduce capital expenses by running on standard x86 servers already used by the hypervisor.
– Automatic scale with each node addition: Every time an organization adds a node to the cluster, it expands both the compute resources for the hypervisor and the storage resources for the vSAN, creating a straightforward path for seamless growth.
– Virtualization awareness for higher efficiency: Because vSAN was running as a VM of the hypervisor, it promised optimized data placement and workload efficiency, ensuring storage performed per virtualization needs.
– Simplified Storage Management: By eliminating dedicated storage infrastructure, vSAN solutions aimed to reduce administrative overhead and remove the need for complex LUN or volume management.
– High-performance, comparable to dedicated storage arrays: Vendors promised that vSAN could match or exceed the performance of all-flash arrays while providing greater flexibility and scalability.
While these promises were appealing, the real-world implementation of vSAN has not met these expectations. The high licensing costs, resource inefficiencies, and complex failure scenarios have made IT teams question whether vSAN aligns with modern infrastructure goals.
The challenges facing vSAN technologies
As IT teams explore alternatives to VMware, they often reconsider vSANs or hyperconverged infrastructure. However, traditional implementations introduce several key limitations:
– Performance bottlenecks: Traditional vSAN architectures struggle with latency-sensitive workloads, particularly when managing high IOPS applications across multiple nodes.
– Storage overhead: Many existing vSAN architectures require excessive CPU and memory resources, impacting overall workload efficiency.
– Scalability constraints: vSAN solutions often scale in fixed increments, requiring simultaneous addition of compute and storage rather than allowing independent scaling.
– Failure recovery and data resilience: Conventional vSAN implementations, like dedicated storage arrays, require long rebuild times after drive failures, impacting business continuity.
– Vendor lock-in: Most vSAN architectures, similar to dedicated storage arrays, lock customers into specific hardware configurations, limiting flexibility in multi-cloud and hybrid deployments.
For many IT teams, these limitations have led them to stick with traditional three-tier storage architectures. However, recent vSAN advancements are changing the equation.
Modern innovations in vSAN technology
The core principles of vSAN – aggregating local storage, distributing data across nodes, and enforcing redundancy – have remained the same for years. However, recent advancements have significantly improved performance, resilience, and efficiency.
1. High performance that rivals dedicated all-flash arrays
Traditional vSAN implementations run storage as a VM on the hypervisor, creating unnecessary and inefficient I/O hops:
– The application VM sends an I/O request to the hypervisor.
– The hypervisor forwards the request to the storage VM.
– The storage VM processes the request and communicates with physical storage.
– The storage VM sends the result back to the hypervisor.
– The hypervisor finally sends the result back to the application VM.
Each step introduces latency and consumes additional CPU resources.
Modern converged solutions integrate storage (the vSAN) directly with the hypervisor and networking, creating a single code base for a data center operating system. This technique, known as Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI), eliminates redundant I/O paths and drastically reduces storage latency.
Additionally, most legacy vSANs rely on iSCSI or NFS for internode communication, which introduces overhead. Modern vSANs leverage custom protocols optimized for ultra-converged environments, improving data transfer efficiency, eliminating bottlenecks, and improving scalability.
The result? Performance comparable to high-end all-flash arrays – but with the cost advantages and flexibility part of the original vSAN promise.
2. True storage and compute disaggregation
Older vSAN solutions force IT teams to scale computing and storage together. However, newer disaggregated architectures allow organizations to:
– Scale storage independently of compute nodes.
– Add GPUs without affecting storage expansion.
– Optimize storage for AI, virtualization, and analytics workloads.
By separating computing from storage, IT can match the specific needs of their organization and infrastructure growth to actual demand rather than being forced into inefficient upgrades.
3. Zero-impact failure recovery
Legacy vSAN solutions often require lengthy RAID rebuilds, significantly impacting system performance. In contrast, modern vSAN architectures leverage distributed, self-healing data placement, allowing storage workloads to rebalance without degrading overall performance.
Instead of requiring complex RAID rebuilds or erasure coding reconstructions, these next-gen vSAN solutions offer inline recovery mechanisms, reducing recovery time from hours to minutes – a significant upgrade over traditional approaches and can enable you to also rethink using backup for storage failure.
4. Inline storage optimization and real-time data management
Newer vSAN solutions implement inline data deduplication, reducing overhead while improving storage efficiency. Unlike legacy vSANs that deduplicate after data is written, some modern solutions perform these optimizations during ingest, reducing I/O amplification and improving write performance.
Additionally, advanced vSANs support multiple storage tiers and allow live migration of VMs between those tiers without downtime. This capability ensures that high-priority workloads remain on the most performant storage, while less critical workloads can reside on cost-effective storage tiers, maximizing resource utilization.
Is it time to reconsider vSAN in a VMware alternative strategy?
As organizations migrate away from VMware, they should reassess their storage architectures. Opting for a VMware alternative isn’t just about replacing the hypervisor – it’s an opportunity to evaluate whether a modern vSAN implementation can deliver higher performance, better resilience, and greater flexibility than dedicated storage arrays.
Not all vSAN implementations are created equal. Some still suffer from legacy limitations, while others offer breakthrough innovations that eliminate storage inefficiencies.
To make an informed decision and get the full comparison of vSAN alternatives download our white paper comparing VMware vSAN, Nutanix AOS Storage and VergeIO VergeOS.
Contributed by George Crump, Verge.io.
