What do you like most about VMware Software Defined Storage?

The primary use of the solution is to make better use of our resources.

Our primary use case relates to the increasing number of customers moving away from traditional types of storage and trying to reduce the storage provisioning time and improve ease of use. That's the main reason customers are asking for software-defined storage. We deal with medium to enterprise-sized customers.

This is one of the more expensive products for this type of solution on the market. The VMware line, in general, is expensive products. The high cost is why some people are running away to use different, less expensive solutions even if that means having fewer features. For some companies, it is more important just to save some money and have basic functionality.

Setup cost is based on the software price and licenses on sockets. A single socket costs you around US $6,000 with three years services. At a minimum, you have a three node cluster for a small or medium-scale company. It can get quite expensive because you're likely to need four to six sockets on the other site to achieve business continuity. It comes to around $30,000. If you compare it with the Microsoft solution, Linux solutions, this is more expensive. When you deploy any of the software-defined data solutions you need hardware. Hardware vendors have their own appliances ready to sell. The main catch is if a customer is proposing a software-defined solution for one of their production systems, they may purchase software and hardware from different suppliers. There could be a conflict while troubleshooting a problem between the hardware and the software vendors. In the case of VMware or any of the brands, it's best for the customer to have a ready appliance, which comes from the hardware vendor with a software-defined data central software already installed. It would mean only one service provider for both hardware and software and hence no conflict. All hardware vendors are currently offering the Software Defined Ready nodes. If we compare VSAN Ready nodes from hardware vender and customer solution based on compatible VSAN hardware and VSAN software, the overall price of VSAN ready node prices will be slightly on higher side possibly around US$5K - 10K per node. And that's the catch if the customer wants one windows services they have a pay higher cost. If you have enough expertise buying separate will save cost else go with the VSAN ready node solution.