Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), with its implicit assumption of one-size-fits-all, can sometimes sound like a great idea. And sometimes it is. Sometimes. But not always. And the component most likely to break the HCI paradigm is enterprise storage.
Enterprise storage can be difficult for HCI because enterprises have lots of different storage requirements. For instance, some applications need very fast storage and provide the business value to justify all-flash. Some don’t. Some applications need very high capacity. Others less so. Some applications want to present the same storage to on-premises servers and public cloud-based servers. Some use cases add in public cloud-based servers in different zones, regions, or even, multiple public clouds. What all of these use cases have in common is that they tend to break a pure HCI model. And when your application isn’t just “another brick in the wall”, you really need your HCI vendor to have the vision and flexibility to enable more flexible solutions.
VMware Cloud® for AWS® is “an integrated cloud offering jointly developed by AWS and VMware delivering a highly scalable, secure and innovative service that allows organizations to seamlessly migrate and extend their on-premises VMware vSphere®-based environments to the AWS Cloud running on next-generation Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2®) bare metal infrastructure.” It is also HCI. Fortunately VMware, to their very great credit, listens to their customers, has the vision, and has enabled the flexibility to address cases where the pure HCI model isn’t a well-tailored fit.
Which brings us to this week’s announcement We at Zadara are pleased to announce that, working closely with VMware, we have developed a reference architecture that makes Zadara file, block, and object storage services available to SDDC guest virtual machines running in AWS, enabling advanced functionality, including:
- Scaling storage performance and capacity independently of compute capacity to optimize business-driven application requirements
- Presenting the same file, block, and object storage to all compute elements, whether located on-premises, within one or more SDDCs, across multiple Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), across multiple data centers, or across multiple cloud providers
- Ensuring consistently high performance with dedicated storage resources that eliminate the threat of “noisy neighbors”
- Maximizing application data security with 100% resource isolation and user-managed encryption keys
provides complete enterprise functionality and control, delivered with the agility, scalability, and convenience of an OpEx pay-for-consumption model and supported 24/7/365 by real, live engineers.
Check-out our VMware solutions page to see how the Zadara Enterprise Data Cloud offers VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC clients storage solutions tailored to your enterprise.
