NexGen Storage today announced its commitment to deliver VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes capable NexGen N5 Hybrid Flash Arrays.

VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes is an integration framework to enable VM-centric operations on external storage systems and extends the Software Defined Storage control plane to external storage through the use of the vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management.

As a member of the VMware Virtual Volumes Developers Program, NexGen has engineered the ability to surface NexGen ioControl performance Quality of Service (QoS) policies and service levels in VMware vCenter. This gives administrators the ability to provide the right storage service levels to each individual VM for extremely granular control.

“vSphere Virtual Volumes will allow customers to transition seamlessly to the new operational model of software-defined storage, while leveraging the QoS capabilities of their NexGen N5 arrays,” said Gaetan Castelein, senior director of product management, storage and availability, VMware. “VMware is committed to the vSphere Virtual Volumes partnership with NexGen and continuing to develop richer capabilities to benefit our mutual customers.”

The NexGen N5 Hybrid Flash Array offers dynamic performance management that allows users to control what data is stored in flash and to tailor application performance to match customers’ business priorities. NexGen N5 arrays are frequently deployed in VMware virtualized environments with multiple, mixed application workloads. The policy-based simplicity of the ioControl software results in a consistent end user application experience and optimal storage resource utilization.

“NexGen is excited to collaborate with VMware on vSphere Virtual Volumes. Our approach of managing storage based on business priorities meshes nicely with VMware’s vision of extending application-centric, policy-driven automation to external storage architectures using Virtual Volumes,” said Chris McCall, senior vice president of marketing, NexGen Storage. “vSphere Virtual Volumes will allow vSphere administrators to transparently leverage the QoS performance tiers and service levels provided by the NexGen ioControl software and will give them access to multiple storage performance tiers on a single NexGen N5 array – reducing cost and complexity.”

NexGen’s software-defined Storage QoS and Service Levels serve up multiple classes of software defined performance characteristics and data services that can be changed dynamically eliminating the need for multiple pre-allocated pools or systems. Customers have access to five simple policies that map directly into the vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management framework. Each policy defines a performance target along with a business priority (mission critical, business critical, or non-critical). Customers simply map each VM or group of VMs to one of the 5 policies to avoid the complexities of configuring individual QoS settings for every VM.

NexGen’s hybrid flash array support of vSphere Virtual Volumes will provide the following key benefits:

• Consolidation of storage silos and policy-based QoS simplicity. With access to multiple storage performance tiers on a single NexGen array, customers can eliminate the cost and complexity of managing storage silos.
• Per VM management granularity. Customers can map a single VM or a group of VMs to NexGen’s Storage Quality of Service policies.
• Change performance in real-time. No data migration required. Because NexGen’s Storage Quality of Service is software defined, changing policies results in immediate change to VM performance.
• Hybrid flash array-based data management services on a per VM basis. These include provisioning, performance QoS, snapshots, replication, cloning, and real-time monitoring. All workloads benefit from an inline data reduction engine and are thinly provisioned.

NexGen will offer support for vSphere Virtual Volumes on its N5 Hybrid Flash Arrays in Q2 of 2015.