The ever-growing adoption of virtualization and cloud computing is driving the demand for high-

performance storage. Existing storage arrays struggle to keep pace within limited IT budgets. IT

organizations facing this challenge are looking for ways to manage their ever-growing demands

on data storage.

The industry is addressing these challenges with new solutions designed to help enterprises meet

their growing data storage needs without breaking the bank. Technology offerings such as soft-

ware-defined storage (SDS) are transforming the way organizations handle their data storage needs.

One such solution comes via a partnership of VMware, Lenovo and Intel, with the companies

offering an efficient, cost-saving, high-performance software-defined storage solution for virtual

environments. CIOs and other technology decision-makers need to educate themselves about the

latest storage technologies and how they can help meet current and future demands.

Data Storage: A Huge and Growing Challenge

Effective data storage is clearly one of the top priorities of corporate IT management today.

According to the “2014 InfoWorld Navigating IT: Objectives and Obstacles” study, about two-thirds

of the 421 IT decision-makers surveyed (67 percent) rated storage solutions and services as being

critical or very important IT investments. That’s up significantly from the 42 percent of respondents

who gave this response in the 2013 survey.

However, deploying and managing storage environments means dealing with many challenges.

One of the biggest is the rapid rise in storage demand and the growing complexity of storage

environments within organizations. Data storage requirements have increased exponentially over

the years, because of the I/O loads and performance demands placed on storage devices and the

sheer volume of data that needs to be stored.

Software-Defined Storage Can Solve Your Data Storage Challenges

2 Software-Defined Storage Can Solve Your Data Storage Challenges

The need to store growing amounts of data has led companies

to deploy multiple storage systems, resulting in complex storage

infrastructures that can be difficult to manage. Complexity not only

creates time-consuming management challenges for organizations

but can also lead to costly overprovisioning of storage resources.

Another key challenge is the need to maintain high performance

and meet service-level agreements (SLAs) in the face of this rising

demand for storage and virtualized applications. Users such as

employees, customers and business partners expect a consis-

tent level of service, including the continuous availability of data

storage resources. There is much less tolerance for downtime or

poor service quality, and given the importance of information in

today’s economy, IT departments that fail to meet SLAs may be

putting business operations in jeopardy.

External storage-area networks (SANs) and NAS arrays continue

to be the default approach for storage needs in the data center.

NAS systems can entail issues such as performance limitations,

lengthy provisioning cycles, inflexibility in the face of change, lack

of granular control and difficult troubleshooting. Legacy storage

systems also present a storage bottleneck for the growth of

virtualization, can be difficult to scale efficiently and often lack the

flexibility and agility companies need in today’s rapidly changing

business environment. Over- or underprovisioning traditional hard

disk drives is a common problem in data storage management.

The rising costs of storage, including hardware, software,

personnel and facilities, are another challenge for organizations.

Shared storage via SAN and NAS arrays has improved with solid-

state drives (SSDs), but the growth in SANs and NAS systems has

now become part of the rising cost of data storage.

Unless an organization relies on direct-attached SSDs and cloud-

based storage, the expense of building a network-based storage

infrastructure will continue to rise. Costs are especially an issue with

proprietary storage solutions. The increased costs of storage come

at a time when many companies continue to face tight IT budgets.

New Solutions Meet Current and Future Needs

New storage technology is emerging to help companies address

these and other storage challenges. The availability of virtualiza-

tion, cloud services and SDS is transforming the way organizations

provide and manage data storage.

The solution from VMware, Lenovo and Intel includes VMware

Virtual SAN on Lenovo’s System x servers (recently purchased from

IBM), powered by Intel® Xeon® processors and Intel SSDs. Virtual

SAN abstracts and pools the disks inside a System x server to

create a resilient, scalable and high-performance shared data store.

Virtual SAN provides a new tier of SDS delivered directly from the

hypervisor and optimized for virtual machines (VMs). The solution is

designed to simplify storage and free enterprise data centers from

the storage bottlenecks and cost of traditional SAN and NAS. System

x delivers the reliability, scalability and balanced performance that

organizations need in their storage infrastructures today.

There are two options for deploying Virtual SAN: use a Virtual SAN

Ready Node or build your own system with Virtual SAN–certified

components available from Lenovo. The Ready Node approach

enables companies to accelerate Virtual SAN deployment by using

a recommended server configuration from Lenovo that is best

suited to certain types of workloads. Customers can start with a

validated starting point and order the Ready Nodes as is or further

customize them to meet their particular needs.

This offering from the three technology partners gives data centers

with VMware vSphere environments the best high-performance,

reliable storage solution with highly granular scalability and radically

simple, policy-based VM management. With the solution, organiza-

tions can quickly deploy storage that continually meets each VM’s

SLA and automatically adapts storage to application requirements.

SDS enables an application-centric approach based on a common

policy-based control plane. Storage requirements are captured for

each VM in simple policies that follow the VM through its lifecycle

on any infrastructure. This policy-based management frame-

work allows for seamless automation and orchestration, with the

Virtual SAN software dynamically making adjustments to under-

lying storage pools to ensure that application-driven policies are

compliant and SLAs are being met.

Data storage requirements have increased exponentially over the years, because of the I/O loads and performance demands placed on storage devices and the sheer volume of data that needs to be stored.

3 Software-Defined Storage Can Solve Your Data Storage Challenges

The enterprise-class SDS solution from VMware, Lenovo and Intel

provides several potential benefits for organizations:

n It is easy to install, use and reconfigure as needed and can

be integrated into the VMware software stack.

n It is managed through a storage-policy-based

management framework.

n Its granular and linear scaling means there’s no need for

complex forecasting and no threat of overprovisioning.

n It provides high performance through flash acceleration

and SSD persistence.

n Its total cost of ownership is lower than that of alternative

solutions, because of its server-side economics and ease of

use and because it doesn’t require large upfront investments.

n Its software and hardware components‘ high resistance to

failures is valuable for always-on IT environments.

The solution supports several use cases. One is for virtual desktop

infrastructure (VDI), in which the solution can handle peak perfor-

mance requirements (boot, log-in, read/write storms), support high

VDI density and easily scale from proof of concept to production

without large upfront investments. The adoption of Virtual SAN

enables organizations to support higher VDI density and improved

end user experience and productivity.

Another use case is disaster recovery (DR). The Virtual SAN on

System x solution can be integrated with VMware vSphere

Replication and VMware Site Recovery Manager to support a

cost-effective DR strategy.

The solution is also ideal for staging and testing/development,

because it provides rapid storage provisioning and complete auto-

mation, reduces the cost of storage for noncritical workloads and

enables cloud architects to easily provision storage.

Major enhancements included in the recent Virtual SAN 6.0 release

provide enterprise-class scale and performance as well as new

capabilities that broaden the applicability of the technology to

business-critical application workloads. Built on highly reliable

System x servers with distributed RAID architecture, predictive

failure analysis, light path diagnostics and thermal design, the

solution can support any business-critical or tier-1 production

application workloads.

Summary: Opportunities for Big Gains

Yes, these are challenging times for IT organizations grappling with

overwhelming demands for data storage. But that doesn’t mean

they have to despair. In fact, this is an opportunity to make enter-

prise data storage more efficient and cost-effective than ever.

SDS creates a fundamentally new approach that takes away

unnecessary complexity and delivers many of the same benefits

companies are seeing from software-defined data centers,

including high performance, greater simplicity and reduced costs.

The solution from VMware, Lenovo and Intel not only lever-

ages SDS but also features several hardware strengths. System

x servers are known for their reliability and uptime. Intel SSDs

deliver consistent performance, end-to-end data protection and

high reliability for enterprise storage. The hardware is also highly

scalable—a critical issue for fast-growing companies or organiza-

tions with rapidly shifting demands for capacity—and it offers

performance balanced between compute, storage and network

components. Another benefit is that the total cost of ownership of

this solution is lower than that of external storage.

Solutions such as this are delivering a radically simple storage

alternative and providing a policy-based framework for easy

management. This enables administrators to provision and

manage storage without having specialized storage skills.

This type of solution gives organizations a high-performance

platform that is scalable to meet future growth in demand and a

storage infrastructure that enables them to reduce the total cost of

ownership of storage by as much as 50 percent.

IT and storage managers need to explore the latest technologies

available on the market and take the lead in ensuring that their

organizations are doing all they can to deliver the most-efficient

high-performance data storage.

Data centers with VMware vSphere environments offer the best high-performance, reliable storage solution with highly granular scalability and radically simple, policy-based VM management.

More information: www.vmware.com/partners/global-alliances/ lenovo/lenovo-storage.html

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