Today, with a 55% customer market share across the 3PAR, Nimble, and Primera platforms, HPE has the largest installed base of vVols in the industry, based on HPE telemetry which shows vVols support for over 160,000 VMs.
VMware and HPE work closely together to help customers support a tsunami of new applications.
Storage for VMware needs to be intelligent, predictive, VM-and-application aware, and deeply integrated into the VMware ecosystem. VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) answers that need by matching storage capacity, performance, and quality of service to application requirements, and effectively eliminating the complexities of LUN management.
Continuous innovation: What to expect going forward
Looking forward, HPE continues to lead the charge in developing new features for vVols such as support for NVMe-oF (VASA 4.0) and support for stretched storage clustering which is our #1 customer requested feature for vVols. Both features represent major engineering efforts and demonstrate HPE and VMware’s continued commitment to improve vVols to align with the latest storage technologies that meet customer requirements.
With more and more customers interested in building private clouds using VMware Cloud Foundation, vVols represents an ideal solution as it delivers fully automated storage provisioning using policy based management to support VM workloads. Strong VMware integration makes HPE Primera and Nimble Storage ideal platforms to use with VMware Cloud Foundation as primary workload domain storage. HPE is continually creating and updating reference architectures for VMware Cloud Foundation to help customers implement these solutions.
“The pace of application growth is accelerating and vVols provides an escape valve for customers who are struggling to keep up”, says Lee Caswell, VP Marketing, CPBU, VMware. “Our joint vVols work with HPE is setting a pace that has customers rethinking how storage integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation, can become a strategic advantage.”
HPE plus VMware for vVols equals strength and maturity
The partnership between HPE & VMware dates back to the inception of vVols when HPE was announced a strategic design partner at VMworld 2011. Since then HPE & VMware have collaborated deeply on the development, testing, and long-term vision of vVols. Over the last decade, HPE has helped customers understand the value of vVols with mature vVols solutions that now lead the market in customer adoption.
It all began when VMware and HPE 3PAR Storage worked together to create a Fibre Channel reference platform for vVols based on the 3PAR platform. The HPE decision to leverage vVols as a competitive advantage led to a corresponding commitment from VMware that now represents a multi-year effort developing new VASA specifications. These specs have set the standards for how vVols help customers respond more quickly to the pace of application change.
HPE helped drive the vVols VASA specification over the next few years to include array-based replication and SRM support, each of which was essential for enterprise adoption. When vVols replication was released as part of vSphere 6.5, HPE was first with day 0 support for both 3PAR and the newly acquired Nimble Storage platform. Similarly, HPE delivered day 0 support for vVols with SRM when this was GA’d with SRM 8.3.
With numerous customer success stories, HPE continues to drive market adoption of vVols. Customers have found HPE vVols implementations simple, scalable, and reliable.
Uludag Electricity Distribution Co, Turkey choses HPE Primary Storage for their vVols implementation. Detailed case study can be found here. “With HPE 3PAR and VVols, we can migrate all our VMs to another cluster faster, we can create new clusters in 15 minutes, and it’s easier to keep our VMs online to create higher SLAs.” Berkay Balanuye, Systems Administrator at Uludag
Over the years, VMware has intensified its focus on the enhancement and maturity of vVols. Today, vVols have become a critical storage technology for its leading products including VMware Cloud Foundation. HPE & VMware continue to invest in vVols to ensure that today’s HPE-VMware customers experience a first-class vVols implementation.
Looking to the future, together we will deliver joint innovations to make application deployments even easier.
Meet the authors!
Lee has a long history of promoting flash adoption as vice president of Marketing at NetApp and vice president of Solution Marketing at Fusion-IO. Prior to Fusion-IO, he was a founding member of Pivot3, a company widely considered to be the founder of hyper-converged systems, where he served as the CEO and CMO.
Lee is a New York native and has lived in northern California for many years. In his spare time Lee enjoys cycling, playing guitar, and hiking the local hills. You can connect with Lee on LinkedIn.
Amitabh manages the solutions product management for HPE Storage solutions for VMware. He is responsible for bringing new HPE Storage solutions to the market for VMware customers. Amitabh joined HPE in 2010 and has previously served as Product Marketing Manager and Technical Marketing Manager for HPE’s Cloud and NFV business unit. Prior to joining HPE, Amitabh worked with Ceva, Microsoft and General Electric in India and Singapore. Amitabh is currently based out of Austin, Texas. He enjoys singing, volleyball, hiking, cooking, yoga and meditation. You can connect with Amit on LinkedIn.
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