Production support for vSAN

VMware vSAN powers Hyperconverged Infrastructure solutions with a vSphere-native, high-performance architecture. DSE is an always-on, Active Everywhere cloud database with Apache Cassandra as its foundation. It includes search, analytics, developer tooling, and operations management, all in a unified security model.

VMware vSAN combines the benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure with the performance and scale of DataStax Enterprise, built on Apache Cassandra. Referred to as Host-Affinity, this policy offers customers additional flexibility to configure vSAN data placement and replication specific to the application that has been deployed. Host Affinity delegates replication to DataStax Enterprise, while maintaining data locality with DataStax Enterprise compute. The Host Affinity policy is available in addition to standard vSAN replication policies and intended to offer customers choice of deployment based on their criticality, uptime and maintenance requirements.

Mutual DataStax and VMware customers can benefit from:

• Options to Increase Resiliency - All storage management gets unified under a single stack, with familiar VMware tools, thus taking advantage of the operational simplicity and cost-effectiveness of vSAN.
• Additional Performance Options - Customers accustomed to scaling out by adding nodes can now easily scale up by adding CPU or DRAM and disk capacity to a node without upgrading hardware.
• Increased Agility - Customers can deploy DSE clusters on vSAN for their modern cloud applications with ease and confidence in production environments.

“Customers love the speed and flexibility of fully distributed cloud-native applications, but can be challenged with managing the infrastructure,” said Lee Caswell, vice president, products at VMware. “Our collaboration with DataStax brings the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure to customers with data that is contextual, always on, real time, distributed, and scalable.”

“Prior to this solution, customers were forced to select between a featureless and more complex local storage solution or the feature-rich option with vSAN, with additional capacity overhead, attributed to dual replication at both vSAN and at the data layer,” said David Waugh, SVP of Market Development at DataStax. “For the last year, we worked with VMware to offer the Host Affinity policy with the goal of providing operational simplicity and deployment flexibility. We’re proud to reach this milestone and help database administrators deploy DSE clusters on vSAN for modern cloud applications with ease and confidence.”