Introducing a Federated Storage Platform
The drive of the IT industry towards cloud is making headlines almost daily, with most analysts focusing on public cloud providers. The combined market cap of Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the top three public cloud providers, is approaching six trillion dollars – almost one-third of the entire Nasdaq capitalization. This pointedly illustrates the immense potential of this opportunity for a new Federated Storage Platform.
The public cloud wins with simplicity, elasticity, a quick time to value and perhaps most importantly, a low barrier to entry, so it makes it cheap to try new projects. There is an incredible opportunity for private datacenters to deliver similar value, and re-capture hundreds of billions of market share from public clouds. Andreesen Horowitz eloquently articulated this opportunity in their thought piece “The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox.” VMware’s unique value is the ability to span across both private and public clouds.
In this blog, we describe what this means for VMware’s strategy for data, data management and storage.
Traditional storage arrays are defined by fixed hardware boundaries, which confine their resources. As a result, they are hampered by trapped data, stranded capacity, limited scalability and elasticity, complex placement decisions, limited data and compute mobility across (physical or logical) system boundaries, and high sunrise and sunset cost. They require upfront obsolescence planning with significant investments to placate technology risk, conflated by disruptive and expensive end-of-life tech forklifts with data migration sprees. In short, traditional storage array architectures cannot deliver a cloud-like experience. The industry’s continued march towards the multi-cloud/zettabyte era is only exacerbating these limitations.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) has successfully stretched system boundaries, and created a whole new industry. It provides x86 server economics, and software-defined infrastructure simplicity and flexibility. However, its easy packaging becomes limiting at scale, and it doesn’t solve multi-cloud services well.
VMware HCI Mesh is a big step in the right direction to disaggregate compute and storage, but it doesn’t span across clusters or create a multi-cloud surface.
Now, VMware is rethinking its software platform for multi-cloud. Storage is foundational because every business is a data business, so we’ll focus on that first.
We’re introducing a new concept: the Federated Storage Platform (FSP). The FSP can orchestrate data across the datacenter, across any number of vCenters and storage backends. FSP provides seamless compute/storage disaggregation, datacenter-wide data accessibility, datacenter-wide storage policy based on application needs (including global placement), datacenter-wide storage and data insights, datacenter-wide VM migration and seamless storage expansion.
As a result, the Federated Storage Platform can drive cloud-like storage operations, and deliver cloud-like self-service storage consumption based on application needs.
FSP converges mixed storage systems into one single cloud-like consumption surface that can span the entire datacenter:
FSP is fully integrated with SPBM (vSphere Storage Policy Based Management), and Helios automatically manages storage pools and policies, based on application needs.
vSphereconsumers can define these policies to meet their requirements, and Helios determines which of its storage types meets them best, instantiates the storage and places the data accordingly.
