VMware Launches New Generation of Enterprise Storage -- Virtual SAN 6 and vSphere Virtual Volumes to Enable Mass Adoption of Software-Defined Storage

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - February 02, 2015) - VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today advanced to the next phase of its software-defined storage strategy with the launch of a new generation of enterprise storage solutions. Designed to enable mass adoption of software-defined storage, VMware Virtual SAN™ 6 will introduce significant scalability and performance enhancements to the company's award-winning hypervisor-converged storage solution, and VMware vSphere® Virtual Volumes™ will offer new levels of storage integration to make third-party arrays natively aware of virtual machines.

To achieve the full potential of the software-defined data center, a new software-defined storage approach is required to address storage-related operational complexity and cost challenges. VMware's software-defined storage strategy leverages the hypervisor to advance storage in the cloud era and deliver the kind of operational efficiency that server virtualization brought to compute.

"Customers have told us they need a simple, cost-effective and cloud-aware approach to storage," said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president and general manager, Software-Defined Data Center Division, VMware. "VMware Virtual SAN 6 and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will deliver on this, and represent the next phase of our software-defined storage strategy. They address customer requirements through an improved hypervisor-converged storage tier, and a new virtual machine-aware integration with existing storage arrays."

In other news today, VMware announced the industry's first unified platform of virtualized compute, networking and storage for the hybrid cloud (read the news announcement), as well as new innovations introduced in VMware vSphere 6 (read the news announcement).

VMware Virtual SAN 6 - Ideal Storage Platform for VMware vSphere
Radically simple, VMware Virtual SAN 6 introduces double the scalability and up to four-and-a-half times greater performance while adding several new enterprise-class capabilities, making it the ideal storage platform for virtual machines, including business critical applications. The release will feature:

• New all-flash architecture - VMware Virtual SAN 6 will enable a two-tier all-flash architecture in which flash devices are intelligently used for both caching and data persistence. The new all-flash architecture will provide more than four times increase in input/output throughput per node compared to VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 while delivering predictable sub-millisecond latency.

• Maximum throughput of seven million IOPS / cluster - A 64-node VMware Virtual SAN cluster will deliver up to seven million input/output operations per second (IOPS) with nearly perfect linear scalability.

• Scalability increased to 64 nodes / cluster - The new release will double scalability to 64 nodes per cluster enabling customers to achieve up to 6,400 virtual machines per cluster and exceed eight petabytes of storage capacity from a cluster.

• New enterprise-grade snapshots - The release will introduce a high-performance and efficient snapshot capability increasing the snapshot depth to 32 per virtual machine while minimizing the performance overhead.

• New Rack-awareness - VMware Virtual SAN 6 will enable intelligent placement of virtual machine objects across server racks for enhanced application availability even in case of complete rack failures.

• Expanded support for blades - With new support for direct-attached JBODs, customers will be able to scale VMware Virtual SAN 6 clusters to large capacity in server blade environments.

Built into VMware vSphere, VMware Virtual SAN delivers radically simple, hypervisor-converged storage for virtual machines. Featuring storage policy-based management, VMware Virtual SAN shifts the management model for storage from the device to the application, enabling administrators to provision storage for applications in minutes. In just nine months since its initial release, more than 1,000 customers have purchased VMware Virtual SAN. Customers have selected VMware Virtual SAN because of its ease of management, its deep integration with the VMware stack, and its high-performance with elastic scalability, and its ability to lower total cost of ownership. VMware Virtual SAN helps customers to fundamentally alter the on-going operational (or OPEX) costs requiring only one-third the management OPEX of traditional storage.ⁱ

Read what partners are saying about VMware Virtual SAN 6

VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes - A New Industry Standard for Software-Defined Storage
With this release, VMware will solve a long-standing industry issue by enabling storage arrays to become virtual machine-aware. VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes is a set of storage APIs that will enable a more granular integration between storage and VMware vSphere at the individual virtual machine level. This enables the storage array to dynamically provision capacity and data services for each virtual machine resulting in more agile, cost-efficient and simpler to manage storage infrastructure. Storage arrays featuring VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will be managed through a common control plane -- extending VMware's software-defined storage vision of application-centric, policy-based automation across heterogeneous storage.

VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes has received strong, widespread support from the VMware storage ecosystem. VMware worked closely with five design partners -- Dell, EMC, HP, IBM and NetApp -- that were instrumental in defining the direction of the technology. The initial set of VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes-enabled storage products, expected to become available in first-half of 2015, will be delivered by Atlantis Computing, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, NEC, NetApp, NexGen Storage, Pure Storage, Symantec and Tintri.

Beyond this initial set of partners, a total of 29 storage partners are engaged in the program with the intention of introducing their own VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes enabled storage including CommVault, Nimble Storage and SolidFire.

Read what partners are saying about VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes

Supporting Quotes
"VMware Virtual SAN has become our core storage platform for our business-critical applications. We look forward to what's in store in VMware Virtual SAN 6 as we continue to migrate key applications that will benefit from the increased performance and scalability capabilities of the new release." - Christopher Reynolds, systems engineer, IBC Bank

"At Namecheap, VMware Virtual SAN has afforded us the tunable performance we could not achieve with a traditional SAN. This allowed us to leverage a level of performance for our customers that we previously were unable to. The ability to wrap our performance at a per virtual machine level and define internal performance SLAs to our virtual machines has addressed long standing I/O and latency issues we encountered. We are looking forward to VMware Virtual SAN 6 this year to further improve our storage network and further improve our service to our clients." - Steve Crothers, senior systems architect, Namecheap, Inc.

"With more than 1,000 customers in nine months, VMware Virtual SAN has proven to deliver radically simple, high-performance storage for virtual machines that drastically reduces TCO. VMware Virtual SAN 6 will open up new opportunities through a wealth of new enterprise capabilities that makes it ready for business-critical applications. VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will help to bridge the transition of storage from traditional virtual environments to the software-defined data center and cloud environments through seamless integration with OpenStack and VMware's cloud management platform." - Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president and general manager, Software-Defined Data Center Division, VMware

Pricing and Availability
VMware Virtual SAN 6 and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes are expected to become available in Q1 2015. VMware Virtual SAN is priced at $2,495 per CPU. VMware Virtual SAN for Desktop is priced at $50 per user. The new All-Flash architecture will be available as on add-on to VMware Virtual SAN 6 and will be priced at $1,495 per CPU and $30 per desktop. VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will be packaged as a feature in VMware vSphere Standard Edition and above as well as VMware vSphere ROBO editions.

Additional Resources

• Join VMware Now to view today's live Webcast of VMware's Online Launch event starting at 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time
• Access the VMware Online Press Kit
• Read more about the VMware Unified Platform for the Hybrid Cloud
• Read more about VMware vSphere 6 - The foundation for the hybrid cloud
• Read the "vRealize Operations Management Pack for Storage Devices with support for Virtual SAN Beta" blog post
• Read more at Tribal Knowledge, the VMware company blog, for the latest VMware and industry news.
• Connect with VMware on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google +

About VMware
VMware is a leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility. Built on VMware's industry-leading virtualization technology, our solutions deliver a brave new model of IT that is fluid, instant and more secure. Customers can innovate faster by rapidly developing, automatically delivering and more safely consuming any application. With 2014 revenues of $6 billion, VMware has more than 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

VMware, vSphere, vSphere Virtual Volumes, and Virtual SAN are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, the expected availability of VMware Virtual SAN 6, VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes, VMware vSphere 6 and a new VMware vRealize Operations management pack and their expected benefits to customers. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in consumer, government and information technology spending; (iii) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures, industry consolidation, entry of new competitors into the virtualization software and cloud, end user and mobile computing industries, and new product and marketing initiatives by VMware's competitors; (iv) VMware's customers' ability to transition to new products and computing strategies such as cloud computing, desktop virtualization and the software defined data center; (v) the uncertainty of customer acceptance of emerging technology; (vi) rapid technological changes in the virtualization software and cloud, end user and mobile computing industries; (vii) changes to product and service development timelines; (viii) VMware's relationship with EMC Corporation and EMC's ability to control matters requiring stockholder approval, including the election of VMware's board members; (ix) VMware's ability to protect its proprietary technology; (x) VMware's ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; and (xi) the successful integration of acquired companies and assets into VMware. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and are subject to uncertainties and changes in condition, significance, value and effect as well as other risks detailed in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including VMware's most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K that we may file from time to time, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. VMware assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

ⁱ Taneja Group, "Software-defined Storage and VMware's Virtual SAN Redefining Storage Operations," July 2014