Building a Business Case for VMware Virtual SAN

The insatiable demand for storage capacity continues to grow: a recent IDC study shows that it is doubling every three years1. In the past decade, enterprise storage capacity demand has grown faster than Moore’s Law, more than doubling every year. It is not unusual for an IT department to manage more than 10 petabytes of storage. In contrast to this extraordinary growth is the largely flat IT budget. Many IT leaders today are struggling to meet the capacity and performance demands given their limited budgets. IT decision-makers must balance cost, capacity, and performance when solving the storage problem. To solve this dilemma, many IT managers are evaluating new technologies and storage strategies.

Software-Defined Storage (SDS) is a new category of storage that is allowing customers to solve these pain points using software and heterogeneous hardware. Technically defined, SDS enables the dynamic composition of storage services, aligned on application boundaries, and driven by a policy-based management framework for automation.