VMware, Inc. today advanced to the next phase of its software-defined storage strategy with the launch of a new generation of enterprise storage solutions. Designed to enable mass adoption of software-defined storage, VMware Virtual SAN 6 will introduce significant scalability and performance enhancements to the company's award-winning hypervisor-converged storage solution, and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will offer new levels of storage integration to make third-party arrays natively aware of virtual machines.

To achieve the full potential of the software-defined data center, a new software-defined storage approach is required to address storage-related operational complexity and cost challenges. VMware's software-defined storage strategy leverages the hypervisor to advance storage in the cloud era and deliver the kind of operational efficiency that server virtualization brought to compute.

"Customers have told us they need a simple, cost-effective and cloud-aware approach to storage," said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president and general manager, Software-Defined Data Center Division, VMware. "VMware Virtual SAN 6 and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will deliver on this, and represent the next phase of our software-defined storage strategy. They address customer requirements through an improved hypervisor-converged storage tier, and a new virtual machine-aware integration with existing storage arrays."

In other news today, VMware announced the industry's first unified platform of virtualized compute, networking and storage for the hybrid cloud, as well as new innovations introduced in VMware vSphere 6.

VMware Virtual SAN 6 - Ideal Storage Platform for VMware vSphere
Radically simple, VMware Virtual SAN 6 introduces double the scalability and up to four-and-a-half times greater performance while adding several new enterprise-class capabilities, making it the ideal storage platform for virtual machines, including business critical applications. The release will feature:

• New all-flash architecture - VMware Virtual SAN 6 will enable a two-tier all-flash architecture in which flash devices are intelligently used for both caching and data persistence. The new all-flash architecture will provide more than four times increase in input/output throughput per node compared to VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 while delivering predictable sub-millisecond latency.

• Maximum throughput of seven million IOPS / cluster - A 64-node VMware Virtual SAN cluster will deliver up to seven million input/output operations per second (IOPS) with nearly perfect linear scalability.

• Scalability increased to 64 nodes / cluster - The new release will double scalability to 64 nodes per cluster enabling customers to achieve up to 6,400 virtual machines per cluster and exceed eight petabytes of storage capacity from a cluster.

• New enterprise-grade snapshots - The release will introduce a high-performance and efficient snapshot capability increasing the snapshot depth to 32 per virtual machine while minimizing the performance overhead.

• New Rack-awareness - VMware Virtual SAN 6 will enable intelligent placement of virtual machine objects across server racks for enhanced application availability even in case of complete rack failures.

• Expanded support for blades - With new support for direct-attached JBODs, customers will be able to scale VMware Virtual SAN 6 clusters to large capacity in server blade environments.

Built into VMware vSphere, VMware Virtual SAN delivers radically simple, hypervisor-converged storage for virtual machines. Featuring storage policy-based management, VMware Virtual SAN shifts the management model for storage from the device to the application, enabling administrators to provision storage for applications in minutes. In just nine months since its initial release, more than 1,000 customers have purchased VMware Virtual SAN. Customers have selected VMware Virtual SAN because of its ease of management, its deep integration with the VMware stack, and its high-performance with elastic scalability, and its ability to lower total cost of ownership. VMware Virtual SAN helps customers to fundamentally alter the on-going operational (or OPEX) costs requiring only one-third the management OPEX of traditional storage.

VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes - A New Industry Standard for Software-Defined Storage
With this release, VMware will solve a long-standing industry issue by enabling storage arrays to become virtual machine-aware. VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes is a set of storage APIs that will enable a more granular integration between storage and VMware vSphere at the individual virtual machine level. This enables the storage array to dynamically provision capacity and data services for each virtual machine resulting in more agile, cost-efficient and simpler to manage storage infrastructure. Storage arrays featuring VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will be managed through a common control plane -- extending VMware's software-defined storage vision of application-centric, policy-based automation across heterogeneous storage.

VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes has received strong, widespread support from the VMware storage ecosystem. VMware worked closely with five design partners -- Dell, EMC, HP, IBM and NetApp -- that were instrumental in defining the direction of the technology. The initial set of VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes-enabled storage products, expected to become available in first-half of 2015, will be delivered by Atlantis Computing, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, NEC, NetApp, NexGen Storage, Pure Storage, Symantec and Tintri.

Beyond this initial set of partners, a total of 29 storage partners are engaged in the program with the intention of introducing their own VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes enabled storage including CommVault, Nimble Storage and SolidFire.

Pricing and Availability

VMware Virtual SAN 6 and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes are expected to become available in Q1 2015. VMware Virtual SAN is priced at $2,495 per CPU. VMware Virtual SAN for Desktop is priced at $50 per user. The new All-Flash architecture will be available as on add-on to VMware Virtual SAN 6 and will be priced at $1,495 per CPU and $30 per desktop. VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will be packaged as a feature in VMware vSphere Standard Edition and above as well as VMware vSphere ROBO editions.