The era of massive data growth presents serious challenges to IT professionals, among them the need

for faster, more scalable, and more cost-effective data storage options that respond to changing business

requirements. To address these storage challenges, Intel and VMware have a vision for the data center that

includes software-defined infrastructure, which can optimize the utilization of data center assets, reduce the

cost of data center operations, and speed the time to delivery of new services to the business. Software-

defined infrastructure can transform the data center from systems deployed in silos with limited scalability

and inefficient utilization to a dynamic, fully automated, and flexible infrastructure that encompasses servers,

storage, and network components.

Intel and VMware are working together to provide foundational technologies that deliver on this vision for

customers’ data centers. These technologies include intelligent storage solutions based on Intel® Solid-State

Drive (SSD) Data Center Family, 10 Gigabit Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adapters, Intel® Xeon® processor

technologies, and VMware® Virtual SAN™ (VSAN) software-defined storage.

Better Storage Management for Data GrowthIntel and VMware deliver software-defined storage solutions

Solution BriefIntel® Xeon® Processors

VMware® Virtual SAN™

Meeting the Data Challenge with Software-Defined Storage“Big data” is a familiar phrase in the IT industry, but the real magnitude

of today’s data growth is often unappreciated. Eric Schmidt, former CEO

of Google, noted that 5 exabytes of data are produced every two days—

about the same volume of information created between the dawn of

human civilization until 2003.1 According to IDC, by the year 2020 there

will be more than 40 zettabytes of digital information worldwide.2

Storing and subsequently accessing this volume of data is a huge

challenge for IT professionals. As storage demands grow exponentially,

IT departments need storage solutions that are flexible, scalable, and

cost effective. Unfortunately, traditional storage architectures often

fall short of delivering on these capabilities, causing bottlenecks,

underutilization, and application workload inefficiencies. They require

significant capital expense, create complex management tasks for IT

departments, and lack the scalability required to keep up with data

demands. Moreover, traditional storage systems are not easily re-

provisioned on the fly, and they don’t have the flexibility needed to

adapt to fast-changing user and business demands.

Server virtualization further complicates the picture. While

virtualization has transformed the way that IT is managed and

delivered, it places new demands on storage in terms of input/output

(I/O) performance, latency, and scalability.

For IT professionals, there is a new option: Intel technologies that

work with VMware VSAN software-defined storage. With Intel

and VMware VSAN, IT professionals can create intelligent storage

solutions that take advantage of pooled direct-attached storage

(DAS) resources to achieve greater data storage agility, scalability, and

efficiency at a fraction of the cost of traditional storage architectures.

VMware® Virtual SAN™: A New Storage Technology for Enterprise DataVMware VSAN provides a software-defined storage tier that pools

compute and DAS resources through the server hypervisor. By clustering

server direct-attached hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs),

VSAN creates a distributed, shared data store at the hypervisor layer that

is designed and optimized for virtual machines (VMs). As the needs of

virtualized applications change, the hypervisor is uniquely positioned to

make I/O optimizations and intelligent data-placement decisions to optimize

application performance. VSAN, which is part of the VMware vSphere®

kernel, is architected and positioned to deliver a high-performance storage

tier via software by taking advantage of SSDs for high performance read

caching and write buffering and HDDs for cost-effective data persistence.

VSAN also takes advantage of a highly available architecture that can

withstand failures at the disk, server, and network level with no data

loss, using built-in redundancy mechanisms that transparently store

multiple copies of the data across disks and hosts. VSAN uses a policy-

based approach to storage management that allows IT administrators

to specify storage attributes—such as capacity, performance, and

availability—in the form of simple policies that are associated with

individual virtual machines or virtual disks. Storage can then be instantly

provisioned and automatically configured according to the assigned

policies. VSAN also dynamically self-tunes and load balances to meet the

policies of each individual virtual machine, thereby adapting to ongoing

workload condition changes and helping to ensure that service-level

agreements (SLAs) are met throughout the virtual machine lifecycle.

Core Features of VMware VSAN

• Integration with VMware vSphere: VSAN is implemented inside the

VMware vSphere kernel, enabling high performance and scalability

through integration with VMware vSphere data services such as

VMware vSphere Snapshots, VMware vSphere Clones, VMware

vSphere Data Protection, and VMware vSphere Replication. VSAN is

managed from the VMware vSphere Web Client for single-pane-of-

glass management.

• Read/write I/O caching: VSAN minimizes storage latency by accelerating

read/write disk I/O traffic with built-in caching on server side flash.

• Protection from failures: VSAN has built-in distributed Redundant

Array of Independent Nodes (RAIN) data protection and synchronous

cache mirroring to ensure that data is not lost in case of disk, host, or

network failures.

• Non-disruptive scalability: The VSAN data store performance and

capacity is increased easily and non-disruptively by adding hosts to a

cluster or disks to a host.

• VM-centric policy-based management: Storage requirements

are associated with individual virtual machines or virtual disks

through policy statements that VSAN automatically translates

into system configurations.

• Self-tuning storage and dynamic storage load balancing: VSAN

automatically and non-disruptively maintains the specified

storage capacity, performance, and availability levels for each

individual virtual machine.

• Broad hardware compatibility: VSAN is hardware agnostic and

can be deployed on any standard OEM server hardware based

on Intel technology.

2

• Interoperability with VMware® Horizon View™ and VMware® vCenter™

Site Recovery Manager™: VSAN can be deployed in conjunction

with VMware Horizon View in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)

environments and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager in

disaster recovery (DR) environments.

VSAN: Radically Simple Storage for Virtual Environments

VSAN makes it easy to provision and manage storage for virtual

machines. IT professionals can quickly provision storage directly

from the VMware vSphere Web Client with just a few clicks, taking

advantage of a self-tuning system that automatically and non-

disruptively optimizes itself to deliver the right SLAs based on the

requirements for each virtual machine.

Unlike traditional storage arrays, VSAN does not require large upfront

investments to get started. A VSAN data store can be created with

as few as three servers and can be used on any standard Intel-based

server hardware. VSAN also delivers a lower total cost of ownership

(TCO) by reducing storage capital and operational expenses through

the use of inexpensive server disks and high-endurance SSDs, with

standard VMware vSphere networking, and through reduced power

and cooling costs. This means that existing high-dollar SAN devices

can be freed up to perform the mission-critical work for which they

were originally intended. Meanwhile, VSAN lets organizations increase

their storage performance and capacity incrementally and predictably.

Intel: Providing a High-Performance Storage FoundationIntel technologies and products work with VMware VSAN to deliver the

foundation for new software-defined storage solutions. These include

the Intel Xeon processor E5 family, 10 Gigabit Intel Ethernet Converged

Network Adapters, and the Intel SSD Data Center Family products.

Intel® Xeon® Processor E5 Family

VMware VSAN delivers a shared storage solution as software

that is efficient, scalable, and cost effective. However, sufficient

processing capability and increased I/O bandwidth is required to

integrate storage intelligence into virtualized servers running

multiple virtual machine workloads. Intel Xeon processors are

designed to meet these requirements with multiple cores that

power enterprise storage requirements in addition to compute tasks.

These processors deliver energy-efficient performance for the most

demanding workloads, support for automated tiering across SSDs

and HDDs, and offer Intel® Integrated I/O for up to three times higher

bandwidth to minimize performance bottlenecks.3

Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adapters

The most demanding enterprise storage tasks can be addressed

with 10 Gigabit Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapters. Based

on Intel’s unified networking vision for supporting all LAN data and

storage traffic on a common Ethernet infrastructure, 10 Gigabit Intel

Ethernet Converged Network Adapters offer significant benefits

in the data center over traditional storage architectures, including

a 45 percent reduction in power per rack, a significant reduction in

infrastructure costs, and twice the server I/O bandwidth.4 The 10

Gigabit Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapters provide the

scalable, high-throughput features required to meet the demands

of combined compute and storage workloads on VSAN systems.

Hardware optimizations for I/O virtualization and native VMware

vSphere storage networking support deliver outstanding performance

while maintaining compatibility with integrated VMware vSphere

quality-of-service (QoS) and teaming features.

Intel® SSD Data Center Family

There is fast-growing interest in the use of SSDs in the data center.

Intel SSDs offer compelling advantages over HDDs. For example, SSDs

have no moving platters or actuator arms that can fail, and they use

semiconductor-based, non-volatile memory similar to what is used

in USB thumb drives, which means that data is retained even with

sudden losses of power. The Intel SSDs can withstand large amounts

of data writes, they produce less heat and noise than HDDs, and they

typically have about one-third of the power requirements of HDDs.

The Intel® SSD 910 Series, Intel® SSD DC S3700 Series, and Intel® SSD

DC S3500 Series offer significant advantages for enterprise storage

tasks. These include full end-to-end data protection, consistent

performance with low latencies, AES 256-bit encryption for excellent

data protection, and high capacities for growing storage needs.

Intel and VMware: Delivering Better Data Storage OptionsWith Intel technology and VMware VSAN, organizations can efficiently

manage large and growing data stores using standard, off-the-shelf,

Intel-based servers. By dynamically pooling DAS resources using

VSAN, enterprises can implement simple and intelligent storage

policies at the virtual-machine level to automate storage provisioning

and management in tandem with compute functions. The result is

lower upfront costs, reduced TCO, and greater flexibility and scalability

to respond to shifting business demands.

3

1 Eric Schmidt. Speech at Techonomy conference. August 2010.

2 IDC. Digital Universe Study, sponsored by EMC Corporation. December 2012. http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/idc-the-digital-universe-in-2020.pdf.

3 Source: Intel internal measurements of average time for an I/O device read to local system memory under idle conditions comparing Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 product family (230 ns) versus Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series (340 ns).

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Additional ResourcesIntel: www.intel.com/storage VMware: www.vsanbeta.com