Today, we are announcing the preview of VMware Cloud Flex Storage, a new disaggregated cloud storage and data management service that is fully managed by VMware.
Digital transformation has accelerated not only the growth of data but also the diversity of data types and storage requirements. To match the rapid pace of data expansion and heterogeneity, businesses today require more flexible, scalable, simple, and cost-effective ways to store and manage their data. In addition, as enterprises continue to distribute their workloads across multiple cloud environments, customers are expressing a clear need for consistent cross-cloud consumption and management of data across the entire data lifecycle. This is where VMware Cloud Flex Storage comes in.
Introducing VMware Cloud Flex Storage
VMware Cloud Flex Storage offers a scalable, elastic, and natively integrated storage and data management service that is fully managed by VMware and delivered with cloud economics. VMware Cloud Flex Storage intelligently combines cloud-native abstractions to deliver exceptional performance and cost across traditional and modern workloads. With just a few clicks in the VMware Cloud Services Console, customers can scale their storage environment without adding hosts, and elastically adjust their storage capacity up or down as needed, for every application. Customers also benefit from a simple pay-as-you-go consumption model.
VMware Cloud Flex Storage is built on a mature, enterprise-class filesystem that has been developed and production-hardened over many years, dating back to Datrium's DHCI storage product which VMware acquired in July 2020. It is the same filesystem that has been backing our VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery service. The filesystem has a two-tier design that allows for independent scaling of storage performance and capacity, using a Log-Structure Filesystem (LFS) design. You can read more about the filesystem architecture in Sazzala Reddy's (Chief Technologist and a founder of Datrium) blog here. The combination of LFS with a 2-tier design, along with efficient snapshots and immutability, makes this a multi-purpose filesystem that unlocks many use cases, such as backup, disaster recovery, and ransomware protection and recovery. With VMware Cloud Flex Storage, we are extending this proven technology to primary storage and making it available in the public cloud, where it delivers exceptional storage performance, scalability, and cost efficiency for traditional and modern workloads.
Here are the key use cases of VMware Cloud Flex Storage:
We will initially focus on delivering a fully managed and natively integrated service for VMware Cloud on AWS. Together with vSAN, VMware Cloud Flex Storage will offer even more flexibility and customer value in terms of resilience, performance, scale, and cost.
We see a model for storage and data that is both increasingly distributed and diverse. Over time, our vision is to deliver VMware Cloud Flex Storage as a consistent experience across multiple clouds, and to enable multi-dimensional scaling of compute, performance and storage capacity, enterprise-grade data management and data reduction capabilities, combined with cost-effective multi-AZ and regional availability.
We are opening early access nominations for this service now. As part of the early access program, we will provide a disaggregated storage solution that will allow customers to independently provision and scale storage capacity external to the VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC hosts.
If you are interested in applying for the early access program, please email vmcfs_ea@vmware.com.
Disclaimer: VMware makes no guarantee that services announced in preview or beta will become available at a future date. The information in this press release is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. This article may contain hyperlinks to non-VMware websites that are created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites. VMware Cloud Flex Storage, VMware, and VMware Cloud on AWS are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions.
VMware Inc. published this content on 29 March 2022 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 30 March 2022 17:14:07 UTC.