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.

• 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.
  

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)
 

The fastest path to an SDS implementation is through the deployment of a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), built on VMware vSphere and Virtual SAN. HCI converges compute, storage and networking into a single, integrated layer of software that can run on any commodity x86 infrastructure. vSphere abstracts and aggregates compute and memory resources into logical pools of compute capacity, while Virtual SAN (embedded in vSphere) pools server-attached storage to create high performance, shared storage.
 

Learn more about VMware hyperconverged infrastructure.