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Certified for vSAN: Ecosystem Building Around VMware Storage
No vSAN yet, but companies back the software-defined storage solution.
For attendees who expected VMware to announce general availability of Virtual SAN at VMware's Partner Exchange in San Francisco today, the product was a no-show even though it was highlighted in VMware CTO Ben Fathi's keynote. Instead, it was announced that the highly anticipated storage solution would be released some time before the end of March.
In its absence, the company announced that vSAN is gaining support from a large number of companies who are in the process of certifying their product lines for use with the software-defined storage platform: Cisco, Dell, Fusion-io, HP, IBM, SanDisk, and Seagate, among others.
Companies who want to deploy vSAN will be able to do so in two ways. One is via Ready Nodes, which are servers preconfigured and certified as compatible with vSAN. As those companies certify their solutions, their products will be listed in the Virtual SAN compatibility guide at this link. The other method of deployment is typical custom-built solutions using hardware compatible with vSAN. Those companies will have their products listed in a hardware compatibility guide as each solution passes vSAN certification. (That guide is currently under development, but upon availability it will be at this link._
VMware officially debuted Virtual SAN at VMworld in San Francisco last summer. It's currently undergoing a public beta test, with the beta version available for download here. The product is likely to debut around the first week of March; VMware's executives will be headlining a vSAN webinar on March 6.
(On a side note, some companies whose products compete on some level with vSAN, were absent from the show. A report from The Register speculates that Nutanix was absent, since the company offers a similar but cost-effective solution on par with vSAN. The report also said it believes Veeam Software, which develops a few data protection products, wasn't there since its solutions are strong competitors with VMware's data protection offerings.)
About the Author
Michael Domingo has held several positions at 1105 Media, and is currently the editor in chief of Visual Studio Magazine.