DAS over Fibre Channel?

ATTO Technology completed the vSAN ReadyNode certification suite with fully disaggregated storage where Fibre Channel (FC) was simply the transport protocol. This configuration, which has never been seen before, is detailed in the white paper “DAS Over FC Technology Allows ATTO to Disaggregate Storage and Complete vSAN Certification Suite.”

Traditional options to build out VMware vSAN environments come with limitations: purchasing new nodes can be costly; replacing drives within existing nodes creates excessive downtime, and adding external JBODs isn’t possible. vSAN architectures cannot fully leverage the speed, power and flexibility of current and future storage solutions. ATTO has a tested solution to address these shortcomings using what they call “DAS over FC technology”.

ATTO XstreamCORE® intelligent Bridges add flexible, external storage to vSAN by creating a direct-attached storage environment with disaggregation using Fibre Channel as the transport protocol. When a vSAN solution is implemented using ATTO XstreamCORE, users can build a low-latency distributed architecture with greater redundancy and full multi-pathing support.

Modifications to VMware ESXi® or vSAN are not required when using XstreamCORE to disaggregate storage. XstreamCORE is virtually invisible to the storage network, allowing vSAN to seamlessly configure and manage the newly disaggregated storage and provide other key functions.

This solution has been fully tested by ATTO but is not yet certified by VMware.