VMware software-defined storage is a simple, yet intelligent, storage data center architecture that aligns with business and application demands—eliminating static, purpose-built and inefficient hardware with dynamic, agile and automated solutions.

Delivering Storage and Application Alignment

VMware’s vision is to evolve storage architectures through the pervasive hypervisor, bringing to storage the simplicity, efficiency and cost-savings that server virtualization brought to compute.

Software-defined storage (SDS) abstracts the underlying storage through a virtual data plane, making the VM, and thus the application, the fundamental unit of storage provisioning and management across heterogeneous storage systems. By creating a flexible separation between applications and available resources, the hypervisor can balance all IT resources – compute, memory, storage and networking – needed by an application.

VMware SDS solutions enhance today’s data centers by delivering:

• Per-application storage services: SDS applies at the VM level, enabling storage services to be tailored to the precise requirements of an application and adjusted as needed on a per-application basis – without affecting neighboring applications. Administrators are in complete control of what storage services, and therefore costs, are consumed by each application.
  

• Rapid changes to storage infrastructure: SDS uses a dynamic and non-disruptive model, just as in compute virtualization. IT admins can precisely match application demand and supply at the exact time the resources are needed. Storage services become fluid—a little more for this application now, a little less for that one later.
  

• Heterogeneous storage support: SDS delivers complete flexibility to leverage existing storage solutions, such as SAN, NAS or direct attached storage, on x86 industry-standard hardware. Using commodity server hardware—the backbone of hyperconverged infrastructure—it enables IT organizations to design low-cost and scalable storage environments that easily adjust to specific and ever-changing storage needs.