Y-o-Y VMware’s customer base grows 200 percent; succeeds in cost-effective hyper-converged solutions implementation

BENGALURU: In a press release by VMware, it was announced that leading globally recognized tech enterprises, Amway, iGov Technologies and SugarCreek have implemented VMware Virtual SAN, the leading hyper-converged solution with more than 5,000 customers. Year over year, the VMware Virtual SAN customer base has grown 200 percent.

Amway, iGov and SugarCreek are running VMware Virtual SAN in support of enterprise business critical applications and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). These customers are taking advantage of the cloud-like flexibility and simplicity of Virtual SAN deployed in a hyper-converged form factor that minimizes both capital and operational expenses. VMware Virtual SAN provides shared storage for virtualized production environments with a simple scale-out model that leverages server hardware from every major server provider to deliver lower total cost of ownership than any enterprise storage solution.

The release further outlines that a recent survey of the Virtual SAN customer base found that 64 percent of respondents are now running business critical applications. That figure spikes to 81 percent for customers running all-flash systems. According to Gartner, hyper-converged integrated systems (HCISs) market is forecast to grow from $371.5 million in 2014 to nearly $5 billion by 2019, which represents a 68 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

Explaining about the its customer, VMware said, Amway, the world’s No. 1 direct selling business, based in Ada, Mich., successfully migrated 300 workloads including application servers and databases running on physical servers and a traditional storage array to VMware Virtual SAN. Beyond cost savings, Amway effectively doubled the performance of workloads running on VMware Virtual SAN. “For a long time we have been wanting to virtualize our legacy business systems but limited SAN capacity and high costs of scaling fiber channel storage slowed the execution,” said Jason Montgomery, senior systems engineer, Amway. “Virtual SAN finally allowed us to virtualize quickly, and with a significant cost savings.”

Headquartered in Reston, Va., iGov is an employee-owned systems integrator and value-added reseller, specializing in delivering mission-centric C4I solutions to its government customers. In the release, VMware said that following a request from a US government customer to design and build a more portable version of their tactical C2 solution, iGov turned to VMware Virtual SAN and its shared storage capabilities to fulfill that request. iGov’s smaller, lighter tactical computing system has successfully completed developmental testing. iGov took a hyper-converged infrastructure approach using VMware Virtual SAN with server-side storage subsequently reducing the weight by 75 percent, improving storage performance by 10x and extending battery run time by 7x,” said Mike Tyrrell, iGov’s COO and President. “We expect to move quickly into operational testing and should begin fielding by the end of this year.”

Based in Ohio with six manufacturing facilities throughout the Midwest, SugarCreek is an innovative, diversified and flexible food manufacturer helping some of the industry’s largest and best-known companies develop Brandworthy Food Solutions. The privately held company relies on cutting-edge technology in its efforts to be the leading producer of the highest quality raw and ready-to-eat foods. SugarCreek has virtualized its applications and compute environment with VMware vSphere and secured those virtual machines through micro-segmentation with VMware NSX. SugarCreek is running VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 in production and is taking advantage of advanced features such as data deduplication, data compression and erasure coding as well as running stretched clusters across its two new data centers. “VMware Virtual SAN’s interoperability with automation and management tools I’m already familiar with was a key selling point,” said Michael Noone, senior system administrator, SugarCreek. “VMware Virtual SAN works with VMware vSphere PowerCLI and VMware vCenter Server which makes management simpler. We’re not a large IT shop and anything that we can do to cut down on time to dig through things or eliminate the need to log in to a different screen makes our lives easier and helps the business run better.”

“We find Virtual SAN is following precisely the same adoption pattern of the early days of ESXi,” said Lee Caswell, Vice President of Products, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware. “Customers who originally bought into the exciting consolidation benefits of hyper-convergence are quickly expanding their use cases to business-critical applications now that enterprise storage features are fully supported and flash performance is available.”